Innocence and its loss are constant themes in the music of Benjamin Britten, the 20th century's greatest gay composer to have remained in the active repertoire, and no singer in a while - and few at any time - have been as ideal for exploring that dark passage than tenor Nicholas Phan. This rapidly ascending American singer, of Greek and Chinese parentage, has chosen two song cycles, Winter Words and Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, and a shrewdly chosen half-dozen of Britten's folk song arrangements for his CD debut (Avie), superbly accompanied by Myra Huang.

It's the kind of recital disc that stakes a claim on you the first time out, the freshness of Phan's voice radiating sensitivity, care for both the composer and the listener, and what can only be called sincerity. Yet what makes it compelling, and keeps drawing you back, is the way Phan weaves, almost imperceptibly, tendrils of that disturbing element present in almost all of Britten's music, and an identifying feature of it, into all that beautiful singing.

A dip into the out Phan's blog grecchinois.blogspot.com (as appealing a singer blog as that of Joyce DiDonato, with whom Phan is touring a concert version of Handel's Ariodante with Alan Curtis) more than hints at what a fundamentally nice guy, and collegial artist, he is. And the video clips on his website go far in indicating what range he has as an interpreter.

But what this CD reveals is his capacity to reveal the worm in the apple, the bee in the flower, the spot on the dress without once having to abandon the bittersweet beauty that suffuses these songs. With the sole exception of the concluding folk song, "The Ploughboy," which functions like an encore on the disc but also showcases the composer's capacity for real, light-hearted fun, this is material, and singing, that bothers you in ways that matter.

Little surprise that there's sinister stuff galore in Winter Words, composed shortly before The Turn of the Screw and set to poems of Thomas Hardy. In "Midnight and the Great Western," Britten captured the poet's pity for "the journeying boy in the third class seat," off to a future he could not possibly comprehend (and we don't want to), and Phan finds the perfect blend of sympathy and dread in it.

In "The Choirmaster's Burial," Phan proves himself the master of the signature Britten melisma, the one on "seraphim" otherwordly but Britten's use of the device throughout the song to depict voices from beyond a brilliant compositional stroke that Phan exploits sensitively. The subject of "At the Railway Station, Upway" is nothing less than the power of music, but because the poem is about a fiddler boy and a convict, Phan sings it in the barest narrative style, a canny way to express its simple meaning and a chance to yield the spotlight to pianist Huang, impersonating the fiddle playing.

Yet it's in "Before Life and After," the cycle's last and finest song, that Phan shows his hand as a Britten singer to the manner born. He floats the line that can so easily turn to crooning in lesser singers, uses vibrato only sparingly but to maximally expressive ends, colors lines such as "If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed" like a Flemish master - and delivers the entire song with such immaculate diction, word fused to note, that you can follow it without the printed text.

He's stretched to what feels like his current vocal limit - this recording makes the prospect of how this still young voice might develop and open up truly tantalizing - in the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the first songs Britten wrote expressly for his lifelong partner, Peter Pears. Six of the sonnets express aspects of the great artist's late-life anguish at his unrequited love for the young aristocrat Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and they're set to torturous music for the tenor (but not for the listener, who can grasp them at a first attentive hearing).

Phan has every note of this densely composed, mostly high-lying music securely in his grasp. The Italian is acid-etched in its clarity, the emotional weight of the texts is always apt without sounding calculated, and Phan lets the musical extremes become channels for heightened expression carried to the very edge of the breaking point. The singing is consistently thrilling, and the cycle flies by as I have never heard it before, seeming both shorter and more impassioned at every listening.

The quiet wonders of the disc are the folk songs, some of Britten's most haunting music and revealed in all their simple wonders by these two fine young musicians. The increasingly wandering piano accompaniment in "The Ash Grove" lends poignancy to the already achingly simple voice line, and the pair is devastating in the smoldering ache of "The Last Rose of Summer."