This mix of songs by pop/jazz composers who have worked with the classics, and vice versa, goes further than mere ‘crossover’: it’s rather a kind of early-21st-century Lieder recital, in von Otter’s words ‘bringing the two worlds together’. After three previous essays in the genre, she now shows added assurance in projecting such styles of song.

A listen to the ‘originals’ where they exist confirms both her range of interests and this record’s success in encompassing these songs with chamber forces. For example, the ferocious irony and sinister bolero backing of Icelandic magus-figure Björk’s ‘Hunter’ – a very electronic sound – are mirrored here in the quartet’s nagging bowing and von Otter’s treated vocals. And Erik Arvinder’s almost atonal string arrangement well illustrates Björk’s escape into unreality, ‘Cover me’.

Songs written especially for von Otter by Caroline Shaw, Colin Jacobsen and Nico Muhly tend to the more conventionally illustrative. Shaw sets an old French lyric of lost love – precisely enunciated by von Otter – to a combination of drones and lute-like pizzicatos. Jacobsen’s is a jazzy setting of Lydia Davis’s amusingly surreal picture of a Brooklyn coffee shop. Muhly’s, genuinely operatic, has much filmic mood-writing for the quartet in Joyce Carol Oates’s poem about a suicide.

The running order of the disc functions well by strong contrasts. Kate Bush’s witty game with numbers, ‘Pi’, is succeeded by the brooding atmosphere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic aria for Kitty Oppenheimer ‘Am I in your light’, a mood dispelled by Shaw’s lyrical ‘Cant voi l’aube’. There are relative blank spots – Sting’s ‘Practical Arrangement’ and Rufus Wainwright’s French ‘Les feux d’artifice…’ are lightweight work from these big names. But overall it’s an intriguingly crafted and well-produced song recital, performed (it says) essentially live in the studio.