A year after Ian Bostridge’s ‘Requiem: The Pity of War’ (11/18), here comes another British singer with a moving commemorative song programme. Both Bostridge and Christopher Maltman feature George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad but the baritone dots his selection of five of them around a programme that he imaginatively splits into four parts, not by composer (as Bostridge does) but according to stations in a typical soldier’s life.

The programme is rooted in English song, where Maltman has proved so at home ever since the release of his debut album two decades ago, but he shows his versatility by including songs in three additional languages (not to mention a burley American accent for Ives’s ‘He is there!’). The project’s long gestation, explained in a personal note by the baritone, can be heard in every bar: it’s a selection that has been honed over the years.

It takes us on a fascinating, moving journey through the early idylls of ‘Home’, the bitter horrors of ‘Journey’ and ‘Battle’ to the heartbreaking ‘Epitaph’. The latter concludes with Poulenc’s exquisite ‘Lune d’avril’. Ireland’s tender ‘In boyhood’, included as an encore, tries to return us to lost innocence.

Maltman’s baritone is impressive and authoritative, and he’s a sensitive, natural communicator who brings a directness to the songs’ many emotions. It’s never been a honeyed voice, and his recent expansion into larger operatic repertoire has, it seems, led to a greater spread in the higher register and at lower volumes, but the sincerity and integrity of his performances are compelling.

For his part, Joseph Middleton is superb in conveying all the worlds conjured up by some demanding piano-writing: from those delicately portrayed English landscapes to the thump of drum and artillery, Mussorgsky’s bloody battlefield, Mahler’s biting cold irony and Ives’s twiddly Yankee-doodling. It all adds up to an affecting, intelligent recital that’s well worth seeking out.