English baritone Roderick Williams’s love of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s music goes back to his school days, and when he wanted to celebrate the great man’s 150th birthday in 2022 he took as his inspiration Gerald Finzi’s tribute 80 years earlier, the song cycle Let Us Garlands Bring.

One of those songs, Who is Sylvia?, from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, is lovingly performed on Williams’s own birthday garland, a collection of 30 songs by RVW’s teachers, contemporaries and students, along with a brand new song cycle and one of the singer’s own schoolboy efforts.

The baritone has been singing this collection, his ‘fantasy birthday party concert’, in recitals with pianist Susie Allan and their collaboration has been honed to perfection for this 76-minute album on the prestigious British independent SOMM label. RVW’s teachers, Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry and Charles Wood, are all represented, as are European mentors Maurice Ravel and Max Bruch and friends Gustav Holst, George Butterworth and Herbert Howells.

His students included an impressive...