Born in 1923, Madeleine Dring studied at the Royal College of Music, where her teachers included Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams. An unconventional career, including stints in theatre, pantomime and cabaret, was cut short by her death from a brain aneurysm at 53. Already considered a maverick, the fact that much of her music remained unpublished until the late 1990s threatened to condemn her to obscurity.

Enter Kitty Whately and Julius Drake, whose wide-ranging survey puts paid to any idea that Dring was not a serious composer. Drawing on poets from Shakespeare and his Elizabethan colleagues to the composer’s contemporaries, Dring’s canny knack for word-setting proves as effective as her ability to find a distinctive new melody for an old chestnut such as It Was a Lover and His Lass.

Whately’s warm, supple mezzo-soprano takes these frequently fervent outpourings in its stride while spotless diction and an intense connection to text draw the listener into an intoxicating world of rediscovered micro dramas. Drake knows just when to give the piano its head and when to offer more self-effacing support.

There is plenty of variety here. Love Is a Sickness throbs with unconsummated passion, as does Echoes with its bluesy, melismatic lines. By way of contrast, a deal of fun is had with the tongue-in-cheek Encouragements to a Lover, ditto Shakespeare’s The Cuckoo. As an encore, Dring’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s In the Still of the Night is as welcome and as piquant as an olive in a dry martini.