Is it any accident that the well-established German soprano Mandy Fredrich has been heard mainly on opera DVDs, well ahead of this calling-card album of art songs?

She has chosen an enterprising, varied programme of Strauss and Fauré favourites mixed in with music most lieder mavens won’t know, but the voice, sensibility and repertoire aren’t always a good fit. A kinetic stage presence, Fredrich has highly focused vocal projection that’s likely to be heard in the far reaches of large modern opera houses, but with the flexibility needed for Mozart. Her forthright tone quality and vocal cutting power are similar to Eastern European voices, and her manner of singing tends towards full-out mezzo-forte. Climactic notes can feel like an electric jolt – likely to win cheers at the opera house but not with the closer proximity of the microphone.

In effect, she brings an operatic sensibility to non-operatic music. Though she pulls back her voice in significant parts of the album, her less restrained moments reframe the music, writ larger than usual, with attention to general outlines more than the specific implications of the words. That’s most apparent in the Richard Strauss section. Even if one can divorce one’s ears from the classic Elisabeth Schwarzkopf recordings of, say, ‘Wiegenlied’, Fredrich’s businesslike faster-than-usual tempo leaves little room for a contemplative sensibility. ‘Ruhe, meine Seele!’ is especially frustrating, with fine singing in the outer sections but with her vibrato becoming increasingly aggressive in the middle section.

Strauss aside, the disc represents another chapter in the rediscovery of Dora Pejačević (1885-1923), a Croatian countess who actually lived in a castle, tallied some 58 opuses of all sorts (symphony, concerto, chamber music) and is represented here by eight songs presented chronologically from her late teenage years to her mid-20s. Initially, the songs seem a long away from her more imposing concert works. But while her melodic sense was slow to evolve (early songs are routine in a mid-19th-century way), the piano-writing leans towards distinctive, saturated harmonies, pointing the way to the masterly Szymanowski-esque chromatic lushness of her Symphony in F sharp minor (Chandos, 6/22). All elements of Pejačević’s art – her increased sensitivity to text, burgeoning melodic originality and unconventional harmonic directions – come together in the closing ‘Traumglück’ (‘Dreamt happiness’) from which the album takes its title, a song that easily stands next to the lieder of Richard Strauss. The Pejačević set also features Fredrich’s best singing – relatively restrained – and establishes her under-recorded accompanist Matthias Samuil as a pianist of exceptional elegance and personality.

The French language prompts a more contained expression from Fredrich in the Fauré songs (that are still better served elsewhere) and in the infrequently encountered Pauline Viardot selections that engagingly follow the now modern practice of creating new pieces on the coat-tails of old ones. The similarly titled ‘Aime-moi’ after Chopin’s Mazurka Op 33 No 2 and ‘Aimez-moi’ after a 15th-century chanson are cleverly positioned one after the other, the latter being a truly lovely creation that prompts the kind of nuanced singing that one hopes is in Fredrich’s future.