American tenor Lawrence Brownlee’s new recording is a very personal project – a disc with a mission. ‘Rising’, in the singer’s own words, pairs ‘poems from the giants of the Harlem Renaissance … working with some of today’s most talented African American composers to create something that speaks not just to our struggles but to our triumphs’.

There are songs by Jeremiah Evans, Damien Sneed, Jasmine Barnes and Robert Owens, among others. And if those names don’t mean anything to you then I’m afraid there’s nothing here to help you. Brownlee’s labour of love – bringing together a new generation of composers with classic texts, championing older repertoire from the likes of Margaret Bonds, recording all with indefatigable energy and style – is rendered almost meaningless by Warner’s failure to do anything more than stick a cover on it all.

There are no biographies beyond Brownlee himself and pianist Kevin J Miller, and no poets are named in the booklet (though the disc’s back cover does supply them). Langston Hughes’s rhythmic, guttural verse inevitably dominates, but there’s also a triptych of poems from James Weldon Johnson (set by Sneed) along with words by Claude McKay and Georgia Douglas Johnson.

It’s hard to get a definitive sense of individual musical personalities from these miniatures but they make a strong collective statement. Today’s African American art-song tradition is tonal, pitched somewhere between Broadway, Bernstein and concert hall. At eight minutes long, Shawn E Okpebholo’s ‘Romance’ (words by McKay) is the most ambitious work – a scena whose self-contained episodes unfold with confident, shape-shifting lyricism. Joel Thomas’s ‘My People’ (Hughes) is another standout: a bold blend of jazz-inflected modernism and bel canto-style coloratura. It’s just one of many tracks that take full and demanding advantage of Brownlee’s astonishing upper register. The stamina here – the absolute clarity and brilliance of even the most angular, vaulting lines – is mesmerising, and Miller is liquid-fluent in support.

What a shame Warner don’t tell us more about it. No wonder the classical repertoire is so slow to diversify.