A ‘grand opera in three acts’ for a single unaccompanied soprano, lasting less than 15 minutes? You expect King Harald’s Saga to be a joke, and there are indeed moments where the music seems to be echoing celebrated operatic extravagances, like Baba the Turk’s cadenzas in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. But one of Judith Weir’s great strengths is that she can combine irony with genuine depth of feeling, and in this early (1979) demonstration of benign iconoclasm she sets out a distinctive and appealing perspective on those alternatives to grand opera which music theatre has been exploring for most of the past century. Judith Kellock gives a finely judged performance.

Written six years later, The Consolations of Scholarship turns from Icelandic sagas to 14th-century Chinese plays. Here the singer is supported by a nine-strong instrumental ensemble which relishes the kind of bold, pungent textures that Weir would soon develop in her first ‘proper’ stage work, A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987). Indeed, so powerful is the instrumental writing that the voice’s contribution – alternating between speech and song – sometimes has to struggle to cut through. A more forward balance for the otherwise excellent Janice Felty might have helped.

This admirable disc is completed by a pair of instrumental works from the mid-1990s. Appropriately, in view of its title, taken from American poet Emily Dickinson, Musicians Wrestle Everywhere reveals Weir at her most streetwise, the shapely modal lines and sharply delineated rhythms, as well as the wind-dominated scoring, suggesting a host of allusions ranging from Copland to John Adams and Louis Andriessen. The Piano Concerto is another exercise in puncturing pretension, making strong points about how both lyrical and brittle textures can interact with folk-like idioms in ways where nothing seems diluted or bland. Exemplary performances given resonant recordings, and strongly recommended.