Many ingredients go to make up the perfect recital, but the first volume of James Gilchrist’s One Hundred Years of British Song includes that indefinable something else. An intelligent, immaculately crafted program, it contains premiere recordings by an acknowledged master and revelatory works by a criminally neglected female composer, but this disc digs deep, with Gilchrist and pianist Nathan Williamson (who also wrote the excellent sleeve notes) getting under the skin of these 19 songs in a way that regularly raises hairs on the back of the neck.

One Hundred Years of British Song, Volume 1 album artwork

The English tenor – and go-to Bach Evangelist (see the most recent Suzuki St. John Passion on BIS) – is a Cambridge choral scholar who began his working life as a doctor, only embracing...