Karina Lucas, a young British singer new to me, and her instrumental accomplices offer an imaginative, offbeat programme framing assuaging viola songs by Brahms and Frank Bridge with more abrasive fare from the New World: the Quatre Poèmes of Alsace-born, Debussy-influenced American Charles Martin Loeffler and Copland’s eclectically inspired settings of Emily Dickinson. Although her tangy light mezzo can grow a tad strident under pressure, Lucas vividly catches the varied moods of the Loeffler songs. In the Baudelairean spleen of ‘La cloche fêlée’ she reduces her tone to a disembodied thread for the mournful final pages, while she and her colleagues tear gleefully into the ebullient Verlaine setting ‘Dansons la gigue!’, where the jig morphs into a Highland fling.

Pleasantly as she sings the Brahms songs, Lucas is no match for, say, Anne Sofie von Otter (DG, 4/91) in Brahmsian Innigkeit. With tempi pushed forward determinedly, her manner strikes me as too plain and extrovert. Nor is her German diction always idiomatic. Lucas sounds much more at home in her native language, whether in the twilit melancholy of the early Bridge songs, voice, viola and piano in musing colloquy, or the strange visions and reveries of Copland’s Emily Dickinson cycle. In tandem with the rhythmically acute Simon Lane, she catches alike the tender innocence of ‘Nature’, the quizzical playfulness of ‘Dear March, come in!’ and ‘Going to Heaven’, and the heavy foreboding of ‘I felt a funeral in my brain’, with its churning, tolling accompaniment. If sustained high notes can become squally, Lucas’s soft singing is always affecting, not least at the rapt close of ‘The Chariot’. For all my provisos, this is certainly a debut recital worth hearing, its attractions enhanced by duskily impassioned performances of two rare early Bridge miniatures for viola and piano.