It’s her party and she’ll sing what she wants to. And have a ball doing so. In her first solo recording, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha arrives not as the typical sleek-voiced Song Prize winner from the BBC Cardiff Singer competition (2021) but as a spinto soprano on a bit of a spree in a selection of music that touches bases some of us barely knew existed. Zulu is one of six languages represented on the disc – maybe the most singable of all – and it sits just fine next to Dvořák’s ‘Song to the Moon’ and Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. Clearly, this South African singer is exploring all of her vocal possibilities – and still finding out where her ultimate strengths lie.

Becoming attuned to her voice reveals more than what immediately meets the ear. She follows Stephanus Le Roux Marais’s slave song ‘Mali, di slaaf se lied’ with Poulenc’s urbane ‘Les chemins de l’amour’, in what initially seems like a bad idea. But not in her performance. The slave song – a lovely, soulful melody that longs for the utopia of her dreams – gives extra weight to the elegiac Poulenc. They connect with their common longing. Between the loss expressed in Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ and in Berlioz’s ‘Le spectre de la rose’, Rangwanasha positions the Zulu lullaby ‘Thula baba’ (‘Hush my baby’) as an island of repose, in one of the album’s best moments. Also surprising is the Rodgers & Hammerstein too-often-heard ‘Climb ev’ry mountain’: I could live the rest of my life never hearing it again, though my life would be poorer for not having heard her confiding, reverent version.

Rangwanasha’s vocal vocabulary is dominated by her lush legato and a healthy vibrato that could easily steamroller everything she sings – but does not. Meaning isn’t aggressively articulated but words are definitely there (even in the Czech-language Dvořák). In effect, the sense of the music rises to the surface, enhanced by phrases contoured with well-placed give and take. She sometimes warms to a song gradually, the opening moment being a bit emotionally aloof but always building into something compelling. Overall, her approach is somewhat generalised, though best perceived more intuitively than analytically.

In such a far-reaching programme there’s bound to be a misjudgement, and to my ears it’s ‘I could have danced all night’. The song gets off on the wrong foot with the exuberant intro taken too fast for her to comfortably negotiate, the words seeming to get in the way and showing that pinpoint precision isn’t her strong point. It’s possible that the voice isn’t fully finished. Catalani’s famous La Wally aria ‘Ebben? Ne andrò lontana’ rises to a climactic high B that’s thrilling, but one hears the mechanics it takes to get there.

Her pianist Aron Goldin is a fairly new name in song-recital circles, and an important one. Opera arias never feel diminished by not having an orchestra, partly because he instils his pianistic role with a clear view of the character at hand and what the piano needs to say, even capturing the open-hearted simplicity to the expansive ‘Song to the Moon’ introduction. In lieder (meant to be accompanied by piano), he’s equally effective, as heard in Schubert’s ‘Nacht und Träume’: he creates a striking nocturnal atmosphere that heralds the entry of Rangwanasha’s superbly crafted legato.