Lieder recitals such as this are a reminder of what’s often missing in others: hallmarks include clean vocalism, unaffected treatment of the text and sequencing that’s more intuitive than high-concept. Single-composer sameness is avoided by breaking up this Richard Strauss recital with similarly lyrical Mozart, providing breathing room amid a degree of harmonic density that one associates more with contemporaries such as Hugo Wolf and Alexander Zemlinsky. With Mozart’s elegance and Strauss’s literary sophistication highlighting each other, the songs seem to be on a higher artistic level than previously thought, even though each composer’s lied production doesn’t lie at the core of their respective outputs.

The programme is arranged with each succeeding song having cross references – rarely tidy or exact – to what came immediately before. Examples: two songs from each composer show how they launched their lied with time-honoured formulas (that’s a nice word for ‘cliché’) but then put a highly personal stamp on the later text stanzas at hand. Mozart’s ‘An die Einsamkeit’ ends with a perfect trill that ushers in ‘Oiseaux, si tous les ans’ that conjures migrating birds. The colour violet referenced in ‘Das Veilchen’ leads to the lighter-shade blue eyes in the opening stanza of the Mozart favorite ‘An Chloe’.

Long a natural Mozart singer, Devieilhe has acquired a more Straussian depth of tone while maintaining her trademark clarity that also reveals her great comprehension of the music. High notes aren’t simply there (and spot on) but arrive amid a soaring legato line that reveals the high-note purposes within the song’s architecture.

Comparisons with Irmgard Seefried’s famous Mozart song recordings (DG) reveal that the two singers share a similarly discreet sense of rhetoric – specific to song rather than opera – that reveals how these seemingly modest creations are not so modest. In some of Strauss’s more Wolf-like songs such as ‘Mohnblumen’, Devieilhe is like a beam of light in a twilit forest – a quality enabled by pianist Mathieu Pordoy’s similar powers of comprehension that (in other songs) reveal the hiding-in-plain-sight influences from Debussy. His treatment of piano postludes is most gratifying, consolidating the facets of expression that have come before. Devieilhe’s sublime performance of Strauss’s ‘Morgen!’ is well matched with a violin contribution from none other than Vilde Frang. Mozart’s ‘Das Kinderspiel’ has a charming, brief end-of-song appearance by one Lucien Pichon. The soprano’s son?