Here’s a classy new rendering of Britten’s five Canticles to set alongside those distinguished versions from the likes of Peter Pears, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Philip Langridge, Ian Bostridge and Mark Padmore. James Way’s instinctive understanding of this stimulating repertoire seems remarkably complete, and he displays a technical security, mellifluousness of timbre and range of tone-colour that excite admiration. Moreover, pianist Natalie Burch offers wonderfully empathetic and deftly poised support throughout.

The present husband-and-wife duo excel in Britten’s radiant, beguilingly Purcellian handling of Francis Quarles’s My beloved is mine and I am his, whose intimate closing bars bring with them a piercing beauty that lingers in the memory. Next comes the masterly Abraham and Isaac, in which Way’s partnership with the eloquent Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean effortlessly generates a keen dramatic instinct that recalls Pears’s superbly insightful February 1957 recording with contralto Norma Procter and the composer at the piano (still my own interpretative touchstone). Elsewhere, there’s an exemplary contribution from LPO and Aurora Orchestra principal horn Annemarie Federle in Still falls the Rain, a tightly woven treatment from 1954 of Edith Sitwell’s powerful wartime poem (dedicated to the memory of that brilliant and tragically short-lived Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood). Way, countertenor Hugh Cutting and baritone Ross Ramgobin comprise a judiciously matched yet strongly characterful team in Journey of the Magi; indeed, theirs is a reading both illuminatingly appreciative of Eliot’s text and one that readily ignites the imagination. As for The Death of Saint Narcissus, harpist Alis Huws shines in the delectable part that Britten fashioned for the incomparable Osian Ellis.

A joy from start to finish, then, and we’re also treated to a considerable rarity in the shape of the compact Cycle for Declamation by South African-born Priaulx Rainier (1903 86) – arresting adaptions for solo voice of three meditations from John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions of 1624, commissioned by Pears in 1953 and subsequently included by him on a 1964 Argo anthology of English song. Suffice to say, Way does them proud. Boasting commendably truthful sound and balance (St Mary’s Parish Church in Haddington, East Lothian, was the helpful venue), this issue has already afforded me enormous pleasure and should not be missed.