Subtitled ‘Women’s Voices in American Song’, Marta Fontanals-Simmons’s hugely ambitious debut solo album takes a broad approach to its own concept: no female composers here, mostly (but not all) female poets and a frequent (though not consistent) ear for the female condition. Yet the programme has its own kind of rigour, requiring a high level of cognitive comprehension to illuminate Peter Lieberson’s 2001 Rilke Songs and to maintain the narrative of Dominick Argento’s 1974 From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, the two main works on the disc.

The most prevalent theme here is journeys from one’s inner darkness into light – expressed in some brilliant sequencing, starting with the bookends on each side of the Virginia Woolf diaries. At the front end, Copland’s three Emily Dickinson settings end with ‘I felt a funeral in my brain’ that leads into Woolf’s journey towards suicide. Woolf’s ‘Last Entry (March 1941)’ is followed by Barber’s ‘Nocturne’ from Four Songs, also written in 1941 and beginning with the line ‘Close my darling both your eyes’ (Frederic Prokosch) built over a series of soothing arpeggios. Similarly, Lieberson’s final Rilke song, about the mystical beauty of life cycles as embodied by flowers, is followed by George Crumb’s setting of Sara Teasdale’s verse with similar flower imagery – this is very early Crumb, sounding a bit like Fauré – with the consoling words ‘Time is a kind friend’. Such poetic juxtapositions make this disc recommendable to anyone interested in the landscape of American art song. Beyond that, the challenges of performing the repertoire are steep.

Both Argento and Lieberson embrace their texts selflessly and scrupulously – in their own ways. The Woolf texts are invitingly unfiltered but are also private, not meant for an audience and having details that can seem inconsequential. Argento zeroes in on the inner agitation, reflects much of the visual imagery in the piano-writing and, at times, fashions intentionally meandering vocal lines that seem to be made up as they go along. With five selected poems from Rilke’s Sonnets of Orpheus, Lieberson deals with something more dense and organised with less visual imagery, and verses that often address an unseen world, occasionally with imagery drawn from ancient mythology. Lieberson always aimed high as a composer; and if these Rilke Songs are often musically oblique, it’s because the composer wasn’t externalising the meaning of the sonnets as much as he was entering into them.

The music is deeply examined by Fontanals-Simmons and pianist Lana Bode, so much so that the mezzo-soprano contributes her own highly comprehending English translations of the Rilke sonnets in the CD booklet. Yet in both pieces, one doesn’t always hear a wealth of insights. In contrast to Brian Mulligan’s volatile approach to Argento’s settings of the Woolf diaries (Naxos, 10/17^US), this new disc tries to establish an overall tone to the eight songs, which is tough in a piece that encompasses such contrasting states of mind, by tempering emotional extremes. Fontanals-Simmons has great depth of vocal tone that she successfully scales down for Woolf’s more introspective moments, and is particularly effective in ‘Last Entry (March 1941)’ at conveying a sense of Woolf battling horrific shadows that were known only to her. Yet she underplays some significant rhetorical moments, particularly in comparison to Linn Maxwell (Centaur, 1992), a Bach specialist who brings interpretative precision to every phrase. In the Lieberson songs, Fontanals-Simmons seems a bit polite and generalised next to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (Bridge, 10/09), who brought a charismatic pathos to everything she sang, whether or not you fathomed Rilke’s verse. Yet where else will you find this music in one, well-planned disc?