Recorded at two concerts in consecutive years of the Salzburg Festival, this album sees the Latvian star mezzo Elīna Garanča follow her album of lieder with piano (12/20) with an album featuring two of the best-loved sets of orchestral songs in the repertoire. As before, there’s no doubting the quality of her singing or the calibre of her rich, sensual mezzo. With top-notch support from the Vienna Philharmonic and Christian Thielemann – just listen to the solo strings at the end of ‘Der Engel’, the opening track – Garanča offers serious and often moving accounts of both Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Mahler’s Rückert Lieder.

There’s certainly something magnificent about the grander moments, such as when she and Thielemann rise to the final climax of ‘Stehe still’ (from around 3'05"), and they offer a reassuringly seductive account of ‘Träume’. Closing the Mahler, ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ is sustained at a slow tempo to hypnotic effect. There are things to enjoy, then, but it’s difficult to escape the feeling that Garanča isn’t entirely at home in the repertoire. For a start, the voice itself is not ideal: it’s a fine, handsome instrument, certainly, but without much tonal variety beyond luxurious richness, while her occasional descents to chest voice for lower passages sit uneasily in these songs.

Her German can be slightly opaque and approximate (it loses focus and accuracy in the final verse of ‘Schmerzen’, for example), but what mainly holds the performances back in the face of very stiff competition is that the responses to the texts feel generalised when compared to the finest singers in this repertoire – especially in the Mahler, where a quick comparison with the likes of Janet Baker show how much more colour, character and emotional richness can be conveyed.

DG’s hagiographic booklet note tells us that these performances were welcomed at Salzburg at a time, mid-pandemic, when live performance was in short supply, and one can well believe it. Appearing now as an album, though – and one that plays for just 40 minutes – I’d say this is primarily a release for the mezzo’s many fans.