Over the years soprano Maria Jette has brought us a series of superb chamber recitals that range as wide as her seemingly inexhaustible musical curiosity, intelligence and grace. This year she returns to the Jaqua Concert Hall with pianist Sonja Thompson and violinist Fritz Gearhart for an evening of song settings by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), whose fascination with the English folk tradition helped shape the markedly “English” compositional style of all his work, from arrangements of English folk songs and original settings of modern poetry to his symphonies. As Peter Ackroyd described it, “If that Englishness in music can be encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic, melancholic, and nostalgic yet timeless.” In 1911 music critic John Alexander Fuller Maitland, observed that in Vaughan Williams’ style “one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new.” Included on the program will be settings of folk songs (“Bushed & briars”, “Searching for lambs”, “the unquiet grave”), settings of Rossetti, Whitman, O’Sullivan and Shakespeare, and a cycle of Housman songs (“Along the Field”, “The half-moon westers low”, “The sigh that heaves the grasses”, “With rue my heart is laden”).