This is an intriguing programme from the Slovakian mezzo-soprano Lucia Duchoňová, consisting largely of works some way off the beaten track. Brahms’s five Ophelia-Lieder are the main exception but are here given in Aribert Reimann’s gentle and muted (in both senses) arrangements for voice and string quartet. On the rest of the disc Duchoňová is accompanied by the various configurations offered by the Asasello Quartet and the pianist Ulrike Payer, whose contributions are generally excellent.

I’m less won over by the mezzo’s slightly acidic, tremulous tone, which is not sensuous or alluring enough to persuade me that either Chausson’s ‘Chanson perpétuelle’, with the banal rhyming triplets of its text, or Canteloube’s rather matter-of-fact ‘Colloque sentimental’ are worth returning to. Walter Rabl’s brief ‘Zu spät’ is more interesting, Lekeu’s ‘Nocturne’ undoubtedly seductive. The three charming Adolf Busch songs, accompanied by viola and piano, are beautifully crafted, as, in its somewhat more episodic way, is Max von Schillings’s ‘Abenddämmerung’.

The central sets of quartet-accompanied songs are the clear highlights. The two Hindemith songs are entrancing, with forbidding, spare pizzicato textures in ‘Dunkler Tropfe’ and unsettling harmonies in ‘Traumwald’. Grechaninov’s ‘Dead Leaves’ offer something like a mini tone-poem in their accompaniments, each of which is vividly realised by the Asasello Quartet. But here, as elsewhere on the disc, one gets the sense that the instrumentalists are more closely engaged with the texts than Duchoňová herself. The only translations of the texts we get in the poorly edited booklet, incidentally, are German translations of the Grechaninov.