For her second recording for Sony, Rachel Willis-Sørensen opts for Strauss, the composer with whom she is probably most closely associated, certainly as far as UK audiences are concerned after her appearances as the Marschallin at Covent Garden in 2016 and Glyndebourne two years later. She’s reunited here with Andris Nelsons, who conducted her London Rosenkavaliers, so you could also argue that in some ways the album, whether by accident or design, forms a pendant to his DG Strauss survey released last year (7/22).

It’s often very beautiful, though the close-ish recording occasionally captures a pulse in Willis-Sørensen’s middle registers when singing softly. It creeps in near the start of ‘Im Abendrot’, for instance, and we hear it again, albeit less intrusively, in moments of reflection in the Capriccio monologue. Elsewhere, however, there is much to enjoy. An appealing darkness in Willis-Sørensen’s lower registers means that the vocal line of ‘Frühling’ really does seem to emerge from ‘dämmrigen Grüften’ for once, before building to a glorious blaze of tone at ‘wie ein Wunder vor mir’. Later on, the rapture as the soul soars free in ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ is superbly done. She’s at her most moving in ‘September’, where the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s focused playing adds immeasurably to the underlying sense of decline and decay. And Nelsons does wonders with ‘Im Abendrot’, as light and colour imperceptibly drain away at the close. It’s almost impossible, I think, to eclipse Gundula Janowitz with Karajan here (DG, 12/74), though some of this is very fine.

The Capriccio monologue, meanwhile, is quite vividly characterised, closer in its intensity to Anna Tomowa-Sintow and Karajan (DG, 10/86 – also with a fine Four Last Songs) than the greater restraint of Janowitz and Karl Böhm on their recording of the complete work (DG, 8/72). Willis-Sørensen proves remarkably telling in her delineation of the self-mocking irony that barely conceals Madeleine’s inner turmoil, and there’s real anguish at ‘Willst du zwischen zwei Feuern verbrennen?’, where the huge surges of emotion in Nelsons’s orchestra take you by surprise. He lingers protractedly over the release of tension that follows, meanwhile, though it all sounds utterly ravishing. It’s an appealing album, although some will find it woefully short. Even in the LP era, Elisabeth Söderström and Richard Armstrong (EMI, 7/82) found room for additional music with the same coupling, as did Tomowa-Sintow and Karajan in the early CD age, and some extra songs or operatic extracts here would have been more than welcome.