This is one of those rare recitals that takes one risk after another – with handsome pay-offs in what initially looks like a questionable melange of Schubert and Wolf mixed in with stylistically distant modern composers and, even more incongruously, Ravel’s Shéhérazade. When actually heard, the programme builds with plenty of emotional momentum thanks to brilliant sequencing and singular performances by the Austrian mezzo-soprano Klaudia Tandl (a marvellous word centric singer) and the imaginative, resourceful pianist Gisela Jöbstl.

Among the German songs, cohesion is achieved with unusually introspective Schubert that looks forward to Wolf, and Schoenberg, as represented by his Op 2 song ‘Erwartung’ (not to be confused with the monodrama of the same name), that looks back to Wolf. Performances eschew the meticulously manicured surfaces often heard in this music. Tempos are on the slow side, which doesn’t translate into weightier treatment of the text but more entry points for the listener – aided by a depth of colour in Tandl’s voice that wasn’t always apparent in her previous recital, ‘Schubert’s Women’ (Gramola, 2021). That expansiveness also allows the likes of Schubert to co-exist with the free-floating but ominous canvas of sound in Margarita Ferek-Petric´’s ‘Für Ingeborg Bachmann’ and the swooning vocal lines of Kaija Saariaho’s early ‘Du gick, flög’, both of which are more like miniature tone poems than songs.

The heart of the album is Betsy Jolas’s 1949 song-cycle Plupart du temps (‘Most of the time’), a mini-masterwork that has somehow gone unrecorded until now, and whose first song, ‘Entre deux mondes’, is also the album’s overall title. The Pierre Reverdy poems focus on matters such as the meaning of time but the two worlds suggested by the title are evident in the fusion of the music’s probing, Berg-ish vocal lines and extrovert, descriptive piano writing that places the music in the Messiaen era. The synthesis is personal to Jolas, and so intuitive that you’re hard-pressed to explain what she accomplished with such elegant simplicity.

Ravel’s Shéhérazade is a different story – but one that doesn’t ask to be taken at face value. Best known in its orchestral version, the smaller-scale piano-vocal combination employed here allows the darker edges in Tristan Klingsor’s fantastical verse in the opening song, ‘Asie’, to seem more real, with well-placed rhetorical pauses from Jöbstl that seem to ask why such exotic dreams inevitably turn violent. The song expansively clocks in at 10'22" – a good 45 seconds longer than some orchestral recordings – taxing Tandl’s beautifully focused voice to its limits, but not beyond.

Tandl’s expressive English diction in Rebecca Clarke’s ‘The Seal Man’ (which explores the inner life of a woman who is lured to her watery death by an extra-worldly lover) aids a psychological exploration of the song, and one that sidesteps any need for the more heated characterisation heard from James Gilchrist (Somm, 1/21). Gothic romance – or any similar artifice – has no place on this recording. In fact, the contrasting worlds explored in these songs are revealed with no value judgements from the performers, which makes the album a consistently absorbing whole.