“It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds’ hung havens, hangars.”

So begins Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, his by turns languid and sprightly setting (originally for orchestra and voice) of part of James Agee’s brief autobiographical prose work from 1935. And so begins German-based Australian soprano Cassandra Wright’s equally sensuous, evocative debut album In the Twilight, which also includes songs by Debussy, Korngold, Grieg and Joseph Marx.

A recipient of the Royal Academy of Music Bicentenary Scholarship (she graduated from RAM just last year), Wright appears to be at home on both the stage and the concert platform. Hence her ability to capture, with such crystalline beauty, clarity and expressivity, the insouciant atmosphere of Agee’s childhood summer evening remembered in later life and the more adult yearning and nocturnal dreamscapes encountered in the rest of the program.

Together with...