In Echo, Ruby Hughes offers a priceless glimpse of a better world. The Welsh soprano’s entrancing album touches the heart and stills the mind so deeply that it continues to resonate long after its last notes fade to silence. It shares its title with a cycle of five songs written by Huw Watkins for her to perform at Carnegie Hall. He proves a wonderfully sensitive accompanist in his work’s world premiere recording alongside a handful of carefully selected companion pieces, the earliest from the 1680s, the most recent composed in 2021. The first of Watkins’ Echo songs inspired Hughes to create a program touched by themes of love and loss, by life’s impermanence and music’s consoling power, and by the promise of an infinite, compassionate justice. “I was drawn deeply to Huw’s setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Echo,’ how the voice and spirit of a loved one would return in dreams,” she tells Apple Music. “I began thinking about how my favorite composers across the ages have spoken and echoed one another lovingly in their music. These echoes have had such a lasting impact on our culture, sometimes in the most nuanced and unconscious way. My choice of songs reflects the idea of composers echoing each other cosmically through their music.” Echo opens with a sequence of dances from Bach’s keyboard suites, each interlaced with three of the composer’s Spiritual Songs in Benjamin Britten’s realizations for high voice and piano, “Komm, süsser Tod” sublime among them. “Ruby has one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard,” notes Watkins. “I think its magic lies in her ability to uncover something beautiful and meaningful in every song that perhaps would surprise even their composers.” Hughes’ album includes the premiere recording of Deborah Pritchard’s haunting setting of The World by the Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan, Thomas Adès’ shimmering arrangement of Purcell’s By Beauteous Softness, an extraordinarily tender performance of I Wonder as I Wander in Britten’s pitch-perfect arrangement, Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Lament to words by Andrew Motion, and Errollyn Wallen’s Peace on Earth to words by the composer. “Maybe personal and spiritual connections will spring up for the listener that help them relate to their own experiences in life,” suggests Hughes. “Music sometimes gives permission for people to feel a certain way without worrying. It can be such an accepting art form. And the themes on this album may well relate to our journey through life and our personal histories. I would just encourage the listener to be in the present if they can and feel that this music is an offering of love from all who have been involved in the making of this recording. We hope it brings us all closer together.”