In the mid-1950s a Cambridge undergraduate asked his professor why William Walton had never produced a successor to the great First Symphony of 1935. ‘Oh dear, well Willie you see,’ sighed Patrick Hadley, ‘he just won’t get up in the mornings and then will insist on playing tennis, or swimming in the afternoon.’ A few months later, in quick succession, two notices appeared in the papers: one reporting that Walton had broken a leg (or even legs) very badly; the second announcing that he was composing his Second Symphony for Liverpool in 1957; in the event he was late and the premiere had to wait until 1960. In that same year, though, he also produced his first song-cycle – Anon in Love for the Aldeburgh Festival – and two years later the collection A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table for the first City of London Festival.

The idea to combine these two cycles with the rest of Walton’s song output was a neat one, but it doesn’t quite come off in practice. Lasting less than 55 minutes goes to show that song-writing wasn’t really central to Walton’s concerns, and it isn’t too generous as a disc either. Soprano Siân Dicker kicks off with A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table, a bouquet of six songs commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Gerald Moore to perform at Goldsmiths’ Hall. Schwarzkopf never recorded the work and Dicker makes the songs her own very convincingly, with plenty of spirit and good diction. The six texts were chosen for Walton by his librettist-colleague Christopher Hassall, who also collected six poems for Anon in Love. Peter Pears, who commissioned them, had suggested a kind of ‘one-man opera’ for him to sing with guitarist Julian Bream at a concert in Shrubland Park Hall, Ipswich. The result is both vivid and piquant, but even allowing for today’s climate of gender-fluidity a female protagonist stretches credibility too far here.

So it is a shame that Delphian didn’t add an ardent young tenor to the bill here – a change of voice would also have provided tonal variety instead of underlining a quality of monotony in Dicker’s soprano allied to a gradually enervating vibrato in some registers. The disc continues with another 10 (much earlier) individual songs, the first four of which (1918 20) are gathered together as Four Early Songs, with the first three recorded for the first time. Along with ‘Tritons’ from 1921, you’d be hard-pushed to recognise any of these as by Walton, so that the shock of recognising his individual voice in the Three ‘Façade’ Settings (originating as early as 1922) is as astonishing as it is welcome. Two songs left in limbo from film and radio tasks of the 1930s and ’40s add little in terms of substance – and only marginally provide variety to what feels rather like a poorly planned recital. The booklet concludes by quoting a letter from Gerald Moore to Walton’s publisher: ‘why the devil doesn’t he write more songs?’ Perhaps he didn’t want to, or was just glad to be swimming again in his private pool on Ischia.