Though George Butterworth and Vaughan Williams were close friends and Ivor Gurney studied briefly with VW at the Royal College of Music, the rather bluff Stevenson settings of the Songs of Travel seem to sit rather oddly alongside the songs by Butterworth and Gurney that make up the rest of James Rutherford and Eugene Asti's fine collection. The generally elegiac tone is confirmed by the disc's title, Most Grand to Die, a line from At the Bierside, Gurney's fine setting of John Masefield. Butterworth's two collections of AE Housman settings – the Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, and Bredon Hill and Other Songs – are interspersed with six of the songs that Gurney composed during the 1914-18 war to a variety of texts, one of them his own poem Severn Meadows. The quality of the Gurney songs may be a bit uneven, but Rutherford handles them all with great tact, his tone fined down, his diction immaculate, and without a hint of extraneous pathos. In the authentically great Butterworth sets Rutherford's approach is exemplary.