Rebecca Clarke’s songs have been edging on to the radar recently, but this recording, led by the mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately, tenor Nicholas Phan and pianist Anna Tilbrook, is the first time they have all been assembled together.

It’s quite a body of work – nearly 60 songs, dating from the early 1910s to the 1940s, after which Clarke largely stopped composing. Around a third of them are recorded for the first time, several are settings of German poetry that Clarke wrote as a student in London; some show her feeling her way towards her own sound, but the best – for example, the quietly imaginative Aufblick – are already distinctive.

Her mature style is dark, expansive and melodic, with a storytelling sensibility that shines in The Seal Man and then Binnorie, an extended setting of a Scottish ballad discovered only after Clarke’s death, recorded here with a solo part for viola, Clarke’s own instrument. Max Baillie switches to violin for some lively folk song settings; another highlight is Daybreak, a setting of half a dozen lines by John Donne in which tenor and string quartet form five equally eloquent voices.

The performers are persuasive, with Whately in particular on superb form, her voice laser-focused and glowing.