This album might borrow its title from one of Richard Strauss’s best-known songs and culminate in a moving performance of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, but it’s the songs by the two other featured composers, Johanna Müller-Hermann (1878-1941) and Margarete Schweikert (1887-1957), that make it such a rewarding release.

The two women make a fascinating pair, as Paul Griffiths’s invaluable note explains: Müller-Hermann more conservative, with an enviable Viennese education and a very respectable career as far as the early 20th-century glass ceiling permitted; Schweikert more adventurous, inclined to follow the modernist currents that swept through her native Karlsruhe. Neither is entirely new to the catalogue – there are a couple of albums of Schweikert songs on the TYXart label, and the Artis Quartet of Vienna have recorded Müller-Hermann’s String Quartet alongside quartets by Zemlinsky (Nimbus, 7/99).

Here Kitty Whately and Joseph Middleton make an especially powerful case for both of them by placing their songs alongside two canonical male contemporaries. Admittedly the Kindertotenlieder are on a different plane – also, one should concede, to the vast majority of Strauss’s songs – but the real quality of the Schweikert and Müller-Hermann songs shines through clearly: here are engaging and interesting works that enrich not only the programme but also our understanding of the broader musical ecosystem of the time.

Among the highlights of the Müller-Hermann selection are ‘Der letzte Abend’, a powerful study in abandonment; the beautifully turned ‘Herbst’; and the more experimental ‘In memoriam’. Her musical language, hovering somewhere between Brahms and Strauss, is always persuasive, often powerful. Schweikert’s songs are perhaps even more memorable, showcasing a confident, distinctive and harmonically adventurous compositional voice: try the beautiful ‘Unser Haus’, the brief but powerful ‘Zusammen sterben’ or the uneasy, haunting ‘Totenhausen’.

Throughout Whately and Middleton prove highly persuasive guides; the pianist bringing the accompaniments vividly to life and the mezzo fully committed to the works and impressive, in particular, in getting the texts across. She’s hardly less eloquent in the Mahler and Strauss, even if here comparisons to others in the catalogue draw attention to the fact that her mezzo, a lighter, less glamorous instrument than one often hears in the repertoire, can sound a little unsteady, especially at lower volumes.

Such minor quibbles matter little, though, when it comes to a release championing such interesting new repertoire and another important addition to the catalogue of neglected female song-writers. This is a very welcome album and one that anyone interested in late-Romantic lieder will want to hear.