The booklet note tells the story of an album assembled by happy accident: a harp CD bought on a whim in Bond Street, a move from England to Paris and then to Belfast, friendships struck up across the water that turned into musical partnerships. Sweet chance indeed. Yet the more I lived with this recital, the more I came to see its title as a piece of charming misdirection. There is nothing accidental about the way these seven items have been chosen and ordered. Tanya Houghton has built a programme that runs from the cosmos to the forest pool, threaded throughout with birdsong, moonlight and the recurring idea of a beauty glimpsed once and then gone. The famous Keats epigraph at the start of the booklet, ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?’,  is the key to everything that follows.

Several of the songs at the centre of the recital were written for piano. Here the piano is gone, its part triumphantly remade for the harp. Howells’s King David is a song whose arpeggiated accompaniment was always halfway to the harp in the first place, and Houghton’s realisation feels not like a transcription but like a homecoming, no more so than in the final verse when the nightingale’s song rings out, washing away the king’s grief. The same holds for Hahn’s L’heure exquise, whose crystalline opening figure loses nothing in the move and arguably gains a degree of stillness, and for Head’s Sweet Chance, whose resonant bass chords sit beautifully in the harp’s lower range.

The choice of songs has another interesting aspect. Hahn’s mélodie belongs to the boudoirs of fin-de-siècle Paris; Howells and Head belong to the English pastoral. Set side by side, they turn out to share a preoccupation. Each is about transience, about the fugitive moment that will not return. The rainbow and the cuckoo of Head’s song, sounding together and perhaps never to coincide again, could stand as the grounding image for the whole recital. Head took his title from the first line of W. H. Davies’s poem A Great Time. The poet of King David is Davies’s near exact contemporary and champion, Walter de la Mare, whom Head set more than once elsewhere, so that two strands of English song converge on the same sensibility.

Framing all this are the two instrumental showpieces, and they pull in opposite directions. Caroline Lizotte’s Suite Galactique opens the disc by launching the listener skyward. Lizotte, a French-Canadian harpist-composer who has done as much as anyone alive to extend the instrument’s contemporary repertoire, writes music of real ambition here, an idea born in the bass strings and flung gradually into orbit before a marketplace finale of jostling, extended-technique invention. At the far end stands Alwyn’s Naiades, his Fantasy-Sonata of 1971 for flute and harp, which draws the listener down instead, into the water where the nymphs of the title drown the men who love them. Heaven at one end, the drowning-pool at the other, and the songs of dusk and threshold held between them. It’s a clever and wholly convincing construction.

The performances are a delight. Jenny Bourke’s mezzo is exactly right for the Howells and The Last Rose of Summer, resonant without a trace of heaviness, while Lynda Barrett’s soprano brings a contrasting ethereality, though never without edge, to the Hahn and the Head. The transitions throughout are managed with care, none more tellingly than the slide from Head’s pastoral contentment into the darker waters of the Alwyn. Jennifer Sturgeon’s flute in Naiades is idiomatically perfect, alert to every shift of the music’s temper. And Houghton herself? Vision, judgement, superb musicianship and an evident gift for collaboration, all in the service of others rather than on display. The recorded sound, from the Sonic Lab at Queen’s University Belfast, is very fine.

Serendipity or design, it scarcely matters in the end. Everything here comes together, and the result is one of the most persuasive recital discs I have heard this year.