This all-Grieg recital opens with Haugtussa, surely one of the most loveable song-cycles outside the German-language repertoire. Like a Nordic Frauenliebe und -leben, it follows the story of a shepherd girl’s first love from early enchantment to loneliness and despair, set against a chill northern landscape of blueberry fields and mountain brooks. The mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland brings to it a gleaming voice, lit with cool sunlight from the north, and a native Norwegian’s way with the words. There is a simplicity and directness about this performance, mirrored in Nils Anders Mortensen’s accompaniments, that brings a deep-seated kind of satisfaction.

Kielland couples Haugtussa with two complete sets of songs, the twelve Op 33 songs to poems by Vinje and six Op 25 songs to poems by Ibsen. In these the tone is immediately more varied, from the dark, tragic mood of ‘Guten’ (‘The Youth’) through to the playful ‘Med en vandlilje’ (‘With a waterlily’, a favourite Schwarzkopf encore, though here with sentimentality briskly banished). A handful of songs from these collections – notably ‘Våren’ (‘Last spring’) and ‘En svane’ (‘A Swan’) – are well known but it is good to hear the lesser-known in their rightful place, such as ‘Den Saerde’ (“The Wounded Heart’) and ‘Spillemænd’ (‘Fiddlers’), both plumbing depths in Kielland’s verbally pointed performances.

Monica Groop’s complete Grieg song cycle for BIS has deeper, darker mezzo colours. Anne Sofie von Otter’s Grieg recital, a Gramophone Award-winner in 1993, offers a mixed programme headed by an intense, Lieder-like account of Haugtussa – not the traditional way, perhaps, but marvellously involving.