Sarah Connolly caresses the opening phrase of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with a welcome dignity, and her voice retains its warmth and focus even through the exigent challenges of ‘In diesem Wetter’; she does not throw herself at the cycle in the fashion of Kitty Whately (Chandos, 3/23), nor yet is her expression constrained with the propriety of some celebrated older versions. Joseph Middleton partners both singers, but the closer perspective on Signum draws out a Tristan-like deliquescence in his opening phrases of ‘Nun seh ich wohl’. Connolly’s rich lower register comes into its own in the guilt-ridden nursery-tale of ‘Wenn dein Mütterlein’, sung (unlike Whately) in Mahler’s original key.

Kindertotenlieder is nevertheless a gruelling listen, as it must be, and one turns with some relief to those Rückert settings where both poetry and music predate the loss of their creators’ children. Connolly invests the first verses of ‘Um Mitternacht’ with an oracular stillness – echoed by Middleton’s piano – which surely draws on her experience of singing the Nietzschean turning point of the Third Symphony. Somehow the song’s religiose climax never sits well on the piano (or the orchestra for that matter, which may be why Mahler added a piano to the texture) but Connolly is as assured at declamation here as she is in confiding the very un-Nietzschean, autobiographical mysteries of ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’.

Placed between the two larger cycles, the early Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen hardly brings light relief; indeed, Connolly finds a new and beautifully veiled tone for the opening song, which is almost whispered at times, and radically slower than most versions. It sets the tone for a thoroughly fresh and rethought interpretation in which the young Mahler, not uncharacteristically, seems to ‘take back’ the inheritance of Schubert. No Mahler collector will want to pass it by.