Calvin Bowman has garnered the extraordinary accolade of being the only living Australian composer to be exclusively featured on the revered Decca label. Veteran leftie and lover of the arts, Barry Jones launched Decca’s two-disc album of Bowman’s songs at the start of this concert which brought together the three talented singers who have recorded some fifty of the composer’s art songs. Such a genre seems decidedly out of place in these times, but Bowman, a self-confessed musical conservative, has cultivated the form for over two decades with considerable success.

While subscribing to an aesthetic of beauty and audience engagement similar to that of the great American song-smith Samuel Barber, this concert revealed that Bowman’s own musical sympathies for the most part tend to lie with English songwriters of the first half of the twentieth century. This is hardly surprising when the composer favours texts by Walter de la Mare and Hilaire Belloc. Such texts are fairly pictorial and suggestive of musical outcomes, and although Bowman’s settings often evoke the memory of the likes of Gurney, Warlock and Finzi, there are sufficient individual touches of texture, harmony and timbre to make them his own.

Bowman is also no mean accompanist and...