Take a cue from the final track of this engaging double album and don some seasonal clothing: you will need it to navigate what is one of the chilliest – engagingly so, granted – recitals I have encountered. The theme is winter in all its many facets and forms, as fragile and cold as a snowflake, as hard and frozen as an icicle of steel. Of the 21 songs collected here – a number chiming in with the date of the winter solstice – 13 were either commissioned or composed for Rebecca Lea, the idea being to create a contemporary hiemal set of songs, not unlike a secular hymnal.

The stylistic and expressive range of the songs is remarkably wide, from the opening ‘Dust of snow’ by Jamie W Hall, with its dreamy, high line setting words by Robert Frost (no pun intended, one trusts) – beautifully sung, by the way – or Helen Neeves’s deceptively gentle version of Blake’s ‘Cradle Song’, to far more developed songs, or cantatas-in-miniature such as Cecilia McDowall’s ‘Christmas Eve at Sea’ (the words by John Masefield), Owain Park’s ‘Winters distant’ or Adam Gorb’s ‘Frost Fair’, one of the most dramatic pieces here, with a largely declamatory vocal line, to a text by John Gay. Its central bell-like episode and, later, spoken Cockney interpolation give it arguably the most varied profile of all. Some composers set their own texts, such as Errollyn Wallen, rousingly in ‘North’, James Weeks in the obsessively constrained ‘Natural State’, its opening section rooted in nagging repetitions of pitches, and Peter Foggitt’s ‘Villanelle: New Year’s Eve’, depicting lovers in bed listening to others preparing meals downstairs.

If Weeks’s ‘Natural State’ stands rather apart from most of the other tracks, even more so does Ben Nobuto’s ‘Sundowning’, its stuttering, rasping vocal lines derived from Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (not a trace of Jake Heggie) and its jerky, fragmentary accompaniment inspired by the onset of dementia in the composer’s father. Mental health rears its head in Jessica Dannhessier’s Covid-inspired ‘Winter Fragments’, its magical rippling coda ‘punctuated by small, defiant glimpses of spring’. There are, though, plenty more winter-pastoral settings: Michael Betteridge’s ‘Snow Day’ (setting his own text), Michael Csanyi-Willis’s fragile ‘Snowdrop’ and Eoghan Desmond’s ‘The darkest midnight’. Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s nicely turned but brief ‘The Core of Time’ sounds like an extract from a larger work: and so it proves, part of her oratorio Five Beacons of Light.

Rebecca Lea, the main curator of the project, sings like an angel throughout. One or two songs suit her voice less comfortably than others. Martin Bussey’s ‘Twelfth Night’ (verses by Belloc) for instance, but perhaps this is unavoidable.

Caroline Jaya-Ratnam is a exemplary accompanist, and Convivium’s sound is spot on. If I had to pick one song as a sample, it would be Judith Weir’s marvellous cycle-in-one-song ‘On white meadows’. A fine achievement, constantly surprising and rewarding. Wrap up warm!