There’s a natural affinity between Baroque music and the folk tradition. The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, violinist David Greenberg and of course Christina Pluhar’s L’Arpeggiata have all roamed these musical borderlands and returned with treasures. A new collection of songs from the Norwegian soprano Elisabeth Holmertz, however, misses the mark, leaving us stranded in alien territory with no musical map.

The remit and raison d’être of ‘Sounds, Sweet Airs and the Art of Longing’ is unclear. Repertoire – all arranged for Holmertz and Fredrik Bock on guitar or theorbo, with additional colour added by Poul Høxbro’s low whistle – seems arbitrary at best, united only by the songs’ English-language texts, and range from Vaughan Williams to Dowland and Emily Brontë settings by contemporary Norwegian composer Benedicte Torget. The latter, with their bluesy-pop inclinations, belong on another disc, intruding into the narrative even as they try to make a bigger point about the continuous thread of song through the ages.

Holmertz brings a rustic folk-sensibility to her delivery, which works best when echoed in the intricate ornaments and husky vibrato of Høxbro’s whistle. She often gets a bit strident at the top, overworking the musical rhetoric of Henry Lawes’s ‘Wert thou yet fairer than thou art’. It’s good to see the missing generation of English composers who bridge the gap between Dowland and Purcell (Lawes, Taylor, Lanier), but they jar with the folked-up Vaughan Williams and especially the almost Flamenco-style arrangement of ‘Let Beauty awake’. A blended version of the composer’s ‘A Clear Midnight’ with Purcell’s ‘Evening Hymn’ is interesting but not enough to redeem a disc that gets lost in translation somewhere between its English repertoire and Norwegian performers.