If you’ve seen Brindley Sherratt in action, you’ll know him to be a consummate stage animal. But the British bass has had an unusual path to prominence. After training as a trumpeter, he switched to singing where he soon won a coveted position in the BBC Singers. Only after 13 years of financial security did he leap off into the unknown, which is how come he’s recording his first solo album at the relatively mature age of 59. It has, however, been worth the wait.

Fear No More is named for a poem in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline that consoles the dead by suggesting that nothing now can touch them while reminding the rest of us that “golden lads and girls all must as chimneysweepers, come to dust.” Sherratt performs Gerald Finzi’s masterly setting with a lugubrious relish for the text’s gloomier aspects, his obsidian bass the living personification of the Grim Reaper.

The same sensitivity to words and feeling for the macabre informs his dramatic accounts of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. Trepak...