• You can step out into clean country air this week without leaving your armchair with two recent releases of bracing English song. Condemned as the poor cousin of German lieder and French mélodies, art songs from these shores are easily dismissed, but with advocates of the quality of tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook, their true quality emerges. Singer and pianist stride into the landscape of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel (Chandos), settings of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson that tread the open road and dwell on the reflections of the restless wanderer.
Gilchrist sings with pure, unaffected beauty, matched by Tilbrook’s sincere feel for RVW’s limpid accompaniments. And there are other treats, including Richard Morrison’s arrangement of Rhosymedre for tenor and piano with viola, played by Philip Dukes, who makes several significant contributions to this highly rewarding disc.
• The restless wanderer also features widely in Sappho, Shropshire and Super-Tramp (Divine Art), a double CD of 52 modern English art songs by a dozen composers, presented by the English Poetry and Song Society. The super-tramp of the title is that poet gentlemen of the road, WH Davies, whose words Dennis Wickens sets so vividly in a cycle of striking originality, sung with warmth and vigour by the baritone Johnny Herford. He’s joined by the soprano Sarah Leonard and pianist Nigel Foster in this wide-ranging survey of an art form that flourishes defiantly in the face of its detractors.
• It’s hard to believe that JS Bach has ever been out of favour, but it took the efforts of the Mendelssohn family to bring his music out of obscurity in the 19th century. Today at Milton Court, London (3pm), the BBC Singers and St James’ Baroque conducted by Peter Dijkstra, with soloists Nicholas Mulroy and Bragi Jónsson, will perform his St Matthew Passion in Felix Mendelssohn’s orchestration, recreating an 1829 concert that played a major role in reawakening the world to Bach’s genius. The concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 on 13 February, 7.30pm.
