Echo is the apt title of Ruby Hughes’s latest album, one which will linger long in the memory. It is also the name of Huw Watkins’s 2017 song-cycle, the centrepiece of the program, played here in its first recording, with the composer at the piano. Setting texts by Rossetti, Dickinson, Larkin, Yeats and David Harsent, it is a work drenched in grief, loss and melancholy. 

Watkins’s atmospheric and economical writing perfectly suits both its subject matter and Hughes’s voice, which is pure as starlight and contains whole worlds of emotion. She’s wonderfully matched by Watkins’s sensitive piano playing. And it’s a work that repays multiple listens, whether to relish the beauty of the first song, as delicate as a dewy cobweb, or to sit in the numbed space, discomfort and anguish of a mother’s grief described in the final one.

Around this, Watkins and Hughes have woven together songs that speak to one another, echoing across the centuries. So, we have Purcell through the prism of Adès, Tippett and Bergmann, Bach through the ears of Britten, and Colin Matthews provides a piano version of one...