As a student at the Royal Academy, instead of joining the serialist establishment, Brian Knowles elected to follow his musical instincts, remaining faithful to the influence of John Ireland, Vaughan Williams and the Beatles. These, he writes, “have helped to mould the composer I am today”. On the nature of that composer New Grove is silent and the most recent copy to hand of the classical CD catalogue is no help either. But here we are with a collection of his songs vouched for as “a terrific example of his work” by Alan Titchmarsh.

The poems, as the celebrated gardener says, include several of the nation’s favourites – Hardy’s “Weathers”, for instance, Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” and Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree”. Of this, Knowles’s setting comes as a refreshing surprise: a jaunty vagabond’s song rather than the throbbing bardic utterance of Yeats’s own reading. This good-humoured, vigorous mode characterises the setting of Auden’s “Night Mail”, expertly written for choir and orchestra and sung here with diction as fresh and clear as their tone by the Brighton Festival Youth Choir.

I wish there were more of them and of that kind of thing. Most of the songs are laid-back in mood, though at the same time they are, in these arrangements, too habitually nudged into another gear by an orchestral glissando signifying an “inspirational moment”. Frankly, I would rather have heard them as songs for voice and piano. Something, too, of the world of musicals and “crossover” clings to the solo voices, and the music seems not to repel it.