Of the four groups of original songs in the present programme, two include recorder. The Birds , composed in 1999, for voice, recorder and piano, sets two poems by Thomas Hardy and one each by Hilaire Belloc, W B Yeats, Edward Thomas, Tennyson and James Reeves. Though all the songs feature birds, they cover a wide range of subject and mood, from tenderness in Belloc’s The Birds, to the uneasy drama of W B Yeats’s Leda and the Swan. The recorder, perhaps because of the subject matter, rarely imitates birdsong, but contributes to the overall atmosphere of the settings with subtle melodic invention.