The Ligeti Quartet ’s performance resonates with commitment and eloquence as Keegan highlights the tensions between man and nature, art and mortality, interlaying texts by Hardy and Philip Larkin. In all, a quirky, highly personal and thought-provoking project.

Keegan’s first cycle, Elegies for Emma, embodies a heart-rending poignancy in that it incorporates the haunting voice of Emma herself...The performances of James Girling and the Ligeti Quartet are perceptive and sympathetic; Lotte Betts-Dean, in addition, provides an admirable range of vocal colours and timbres together with excellent, clear diction.

Keegan is supremely attuned not only to the finer details of Hardy’s poetry but also to his peculiar blend of old-school pastoral and what he once termed ‘the ache of modernism’; Betts-Dean is utterly compelling throughout, with immaculate diction and a full palette of colours available across her wide range. Die-hard Hardy fans will doubtless relish rediscovering these texts through Keegan’s perspectives, but I’ll wager that this album will spark a fair few new love-affairs with his poetry as well.

Anyone with an ear for Thomas Hardy’s poetry will respond to the sinewy variety of The Past & I...Betts-Dean, who has an acute response to the texts, is equally at home in the pastoral wistfulness of Gerald Finzi and Imogen Holst as in the quirky originality of Kerry Andrew (b 1978).