Here’s something different: an imaginative programme celebrating God’s own country in its own words and music. And the whole project is as tartan and haggis as it comes. There is poetry by Robert Burns (in his own Lallans tongue and in German translation), Robert Louis Stevenson and that great lyricist Anon, who also composed some of the music here. Tenor Glen Cunningham hails from Inverness and studied at his country’s Royal Conservatoire; Anna Tilbrook’s roots are in nearby Alness; Stuart MacRae, whose cycle Five Stevenson Songs (a new commission) is included also comes from Inverness; there are three most attractive folk-song arrangements by the Glasgow-born (1938) pianist and composer Claire Liddell; the disc was recorded in St Mary’s, Haddington (East Lothian); the record label is proudly Scots; even the booklet writer, Lucy Walker, is half-Scot and lives in Caithness.

The first track is Burns’s ‘Ca’ the yowes to the knowes’, which is as incomprehensible to the average English speaker as any of the German songs that follow. Though the booklet contains all the texts and, where necessary, translations, a version of them all in plain English would have been useful. After ‘Ca’ the yowes’ (a Liddell arrangement) come all eight of the 26 songs from Robert Schumann’s cycle Myrthen that have lyrics by Burns translated from Lallans into German. Track 11 is ‘My love is like a red, red rose’, one of the most beautiful of all Scottish songs, heard here in a touching arrangement by Edinburgh-born Thomas Swift Gleadhill (1827 90). Cunningham, I note, takes a leaf out of Kenneth McKellar’s book and sings the last bars mezza voce. Very effective.

After that come three composers’ very different settings of Stevenson poems. Cunningham and Tilbrook sensibly omit the first of the five Liza Lehmann included in the 12 songs that comprise The Daisy Chain, published in 1900 (No 1, ‘Foreign Children’, is a now embarrassingly condescending Western child’s view of other lands and cultures). Stuart MacRae’s new cycle follows, reminding me irresistibly (good or bad, depending on personal taste) of Pears and Britten. Indeed, it was at this point of the disc that Glen Cunningham’s limitations became most apparent. Many of these songs are in the same tessitura and leisurely tempos. By track 17, a certain sameness in dynamics and delivery has set in. Though he clearly relishes channelling his inner McCormack with his bright tone, splendid heroic attack and crystal-clear diction, 29 short numbers delivered with the same ardency and fervour is a lot to take at a single sitting. (I’d have welcomed a piano solo from Tilbrook as contrast. Her support throughout is exemplary.)

That said, when we reach Reynaldo Hahn’s charming Five Little Songs (two of which have the same texts as two of Lehmann’s), Cunningham shows that he does have a lighter, less earnest touch at his disposal. The pair finish with the album’s title-song, one to which Kenneth McKellar brought an easy grace, as he did all the Burns songs he recorded for Decca (9/62). He sang with a smile – a skill that the gifted Glen Cunningham has yet to acquire.