He is more dramatic, more "tenorish" if you will, than the lighter-voiced James Gilchrist in the recording from Linn that I so admired last year. But it is a complementary approach that ably characterises the two figures in "Is My Team Ploughing?", where Padmore brings a knowing inevitability to the closing lines: "I cheer a dead man's sweetheart, Never ask me whose." Equal protagonists are the piano and strings of the Schubert Ensemble, whipping up a veritable gale in the title song and portraying Vaughan Williams's masterly transformation from sultry summer to icy winter in the string writing of "Bredon Hill" with a great sense of atmosphere.

On its own, the Schubert Ensemble fills out this disc with two of RVW's early chamber works. The C minor Piano Quintet - written for the same combination, with double bass, as Schubert's "Trout" Quintet - sees the composer exploring an unexpectedly Brahmsian language in 1904; the work was subsequently withdrawn and only re-released to the world by the composer's widow as recently as 1999.

Like the accompanying Romance and Pastorale for violin and piano from the same pre-Great War period, it featured on the Nash Ensemble's groundbreaking survey of Vaughan Williams's chamber works released on Hyperion in 2002. It is good to see these works gaining acceptance, and the Schubert Ensemble tackles the Quintet with as much relish and authority as if it were a mainstream part of the repertoire. Meanwhile, the violinist Simon Blendis and the pianist William Howard bring out all the wistful musing of the two miniatures.

-- Matthew Rye, www.telegraph.co.uk