Ruby Hughes’s last solo album for BIS (2/20), recorded with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, featured Berg and Mahler (the Rückert Lieder) coupled with Rhian Samuel’s Clytemnestra (1994). Here the soprano offers two more Mahler cycles alongside Ives and another superb contemporary work, Bright Travellers by Helen Grime. And her artistry is even more compellingly conveyed with just piano: she and the excellent Joseph Middleton create a remarkable sound world of intense intimacy, captured by BIS in demonstration-quality sound.

That sound world is fully apt for the songs at hand, which, after the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, address parenthood and, in Bright Travellers, motherhood specifically. Grime’s musical language in her new cycle is immediately engaging and evocative, reflecting with tenderness and unerring skill the different worlds and feelings of Fiona Benson’s strikingly honest poetry: from first inklings to breastfeeding and, in ‘Council Offices’, a harrowing remembrance of stillbirth that melts into a moving lullaby, sung here with naked, daring delicacy.

Hughes and Middleton gave the premiere of Bright Things at Wigmore Hall in 2017 and it’s hard to imagine anyone performing it better. The cycle itself, meanwhile, is undoubtedly an important addition to a repertory where parenthood is invariably seen from the father’s perspective. Such is the case with Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, but Hughes and Middleton manage here to present the songs afresh in a way that complements the Grime beautifully.

Their approach fully lets both poetry and music come across on their own terms, and while there have been more powerful, more gut-wrenching accounts of these songs, there aren’t many so delicately touching or intelligent. The same approach pays dividends in the Ives selections, cleverly programmed around the Grime cycle, as well as in a wide-eyed performance of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen that glistens with a wonderful dewy freshness – from both soprano and pianist.

Huw Watkins’s unobtrusive arrangement of the Welsh lullaby ‘Suo Gân’, meltingly performed, is an inspired choice to complete the programme. An outstanding recital.