In her debut solo recital recording, South African soprano Golda Schultz emerges as a master storyteller, an enterprising programmer and, most important, a lustrous Mozart/Strauss soprano. Though the disc’s all-female-composer concept is increasingly common these days, Schultz’s starting point is the question, according to the booklet notes, ‘what if a woman told her own story?’ Thus one’s ears are attuned to what – in this cross section of songs from the mid-19th century to the present – women say in music that men don’t, even if the poets they choose happen to be men.

The most ready comparisons are songs by female composers based on poems and legends that are well known in male-authored versions. Discussion of differences could fill dissertations. But if I may risk cursory observations based on the composers represented here, one hears something more cogent and unified in the ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ of Clara Schumann, in contrast to Mahler’s more contemplative setting. A matter of gender? The general culture of each composer’s respective era? A bit of both?

The subject of parenthood is another point of comparison. For Emilie Mayer, the child-stealing fairy in ‘Erlkönig’ is a bigger, more seductive presence than in Schubert’s more plot-driven version, and is more chilling because the listener feels much greater identification with the boy being abducted. The ‘Cradle Song’ of Rebecca Clarke, with words by William Blake, also has exceptional child empathy, especially in the closing moments when a piano flourish departs into a different key – to dreamland, of course. More and more, Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) is emerging as an extraordinary compositional figure before she devoted herself to pedagogy, particularly in ‘Cantique’, where she captures a subtle but eloquent mixture of detachment in Maurice Maeterlinck’s text about how love-induced tears are never for nought.

The album takes its title, ‘This Be Her Verse’, from the concluding song-cycle by South African composer Kathleen Tagg (b1977), a multitalented artist who with poet Lila Palmer (b1986) makes a fierce contribution to the art-song repertoire. In the opening song, ‘After Philip Larkin’, Tagg makes haunting use of pithy, repetitive motifs and extended piano techniques, poetically rendered by Jonathan Ware. The rest of the cycle gives a refracted, almost cubist view of the subjects at hand, told in half-completed thoughts and in a dizzying array of impressions, concluding with Schultz singing an intense high A that will not be soon forgotten. That’s one of the great aspects of the Schultz voice: in addition to her instinctual projection of words and eloquent phrase-shaping, her vocal colour morphs seamlessly from one register to another, each more alluring than the last.