Two unrecorded offerings by Holst launch what Somm promises will be a three-volume exploration of some lesser-known corners of the British song repertoire. Indeed, straight away there’s a surprise in store as ‘A Vigil of Pentecost’ (1914) emerges as a preparatory sketch for ‘Venus’ from The Planets, its stately and serene countenance forming an agreeable contrast with ‘The Ballad of Hunting Knowe’, a breezy affair with a whiff of the fiddler’s jig about it (composed some time in the 1920s, it’s based on a ghostly tale set in the Scottish Borders). We’re also treated to five of Holst’s Twelve Humbert Wolfe Songs (composed in 1929 and bundled together for publication some 40 years later by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten), including the mesmerically beautiful ‘The Dream-City’, disarming ‘The Floral Bandit’ (listen out for some witty quotations from Debussy, Schubert and Bach), and ending with that unnervingly bleak and wondrously questing utterance, ‘Betelgeuse’ (music very much in the same mould as Egdon Heath).

Another Wolfe setting – the haunting ‘Journey’s End’ by Frank Bridge from 1925 – closes the programme, and it’s preceded by the intoxicating Three Tagore Songs that Bridge composed between 1922 and 1925 (the last of which, ‘Dweller in my deathless dreams’, was written at the behest of John McCormack, who gave the premiere in June 1925). Like the imposing Piano Sonata (1921-24), all display a searching harmonic scope that points to this figure’s fully mature style (beginning with the masterly Third String Quartet of 1926). A sequence devoted to Ivor Gurney embraces his gorgeously lyrical treatment (from 1920) of Yeats’s ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, as well as two sombre settings of Edward Thomas (1878-1917), ‘Snow’ and ‘Lights Out’, whose harmonically ambiguous final cadence seems to find a natural resolution in ‘Sleep’ (from 1913, to a poem by John Fletcher – one of the Five Elizabethan Songs published in 1920). Of the four songs by Rebecca Clarke I was particularly taken with the gripping narrative power distilled in her response to John Masefield’s prose poem ‘The Seal Man’, not to mention the doom-laden chill that shudders the senses in ‘Eight O’Clock’ (AE Housman).

Apart from one or two patches of momentary unsteadiness, James Gilchrist’s contribution is past praise in its probing range of expression and unfailing sensitivity to the text. What’s more, he enjoys immaculate support throughout from Nathan Williamson, who also provides a stimulating booklet essay. Glowingly realistic sound and full texts boost the desirability of a most impressive release. I look forward to the next helping!