The premiere of his radio opera The Wandering Jew in 2010 seems to have lifted a huge creative weight off Robert Saxton's shoulders. After more than a decade when the project dominated everything, he has started to produce works in a range of genres once again. There's been a new string quartet, a trumpet concerto, and now a song cycle, Time and the Seasons, which the Oxford Lieder festival commissioned and the baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Andrew West introduced there.

The new cycle has a link with The Wandering Jew as well, for Williams sang the main role in that work. But the starting point was a single song set to his own poem that Saxton contributed to the NMC Songbook, compiled by the contemporary-music label six years ago. That setting is now the final one in Saxton's seven-part sequence, which moves through the seasons, beginning and ending in winter, with a central "summer seascape" for piano alone.

It's an effective, carefully worked plan. Musically, it suggests some unlikely, surprisingly English comparisons. While many of the vocal lines have the haunting, elegiac quality of Finzi's Hardy songs, the hyperactivity of some of the piano writing, often untethered from the voice, recalls Tippett's song cycle The Heart's Assurance. But it all hangs together well; Saxton's poetry does its evocative job and the music supports and enhances it every step of the way.

Williams and West prefaced the premiere with a selection of seasonal songs by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. They followed it with more Schumann – the cycle Dichterliebe – in which Williams perfectly captured the balance between anger and irony, bittersweet recollection and despair, and made every word, every syllable, matter.

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