Not since Simon Keenlyside’s Gramophone Award-winning ‘Songs of War’ (Sony, 2/12) have pre-existing art songs been so effectively moulded into a total statement, and one that, like the Keenlyside disc, confronts wars from Joan of Arc to the Second World War. Time and again, Anna Prohaska and Eric Schneider contrast the public and private faces of war – duty to vanquish an evil enemy versus loss of human life, both on a mass scale (in Ives’s ‘In Flanders Fields’) or much more intimately (in Mahler’s ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ from Des Knaben Wunderhorn).

Barely filtered anger comes from unexpected places. Schubert’s harmonies match the darkest moments of Winterreise in ‘Kriegers Ahnung’ from Schwanengesang; Prohaska’s delivery all but seethes. Schumann sardonically quotes the Marseillaise in ‘Die beiden Grenadiere’, a portrait of two defeated French soldiers who want only to die. Ives’s dreamy, semi-tonal ‘Tom Sails Away’ speaks of nostalgia but plays like an expiring life passing before one’s eyes. More direct in their messages are Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill. Wolfgang Rihm’s dissonance has rarely seemed so at home.

Songs seem to be chosen more for how they support the concept than for their quality. Thus, music that might not normally make much impression or be heard at all outside of comprehensive anthologies does indeed pull its weight. The disc’s sequencing is brilliant. When the Mahler song arrives near the end, its piano-only opening, powerful in any context, profoundly distils much that has come before it.

Prohaska’s performances fully embody the hugely varying needs of each songs, so much that one barely notices how she colours her voice in a variety of ways to suit the more vernacular Eisler or more operatic Mahler. She simply allows you to feel the song with the clean, crisp delivery that has made her an important early-music singer. Her sense of language is excellent. Booklet-notes and text translations are smartly done. Too bad the cover looks like something from a grim documentary film. Such a well-honed artistic statement is provocative but too accomplished to ever be grim.