Previous ABC releases from this popular Australian bass-baritone have included a Mozart album which shows off the lighter side of a powerful vocal personality (A/05) and a recital of ‘Serious Songs’ in which he embodies the world-weary wanderer of Brahms’s Requiem and the late cycle of the album-title. He brings the same vocal personality to this Mahler recital but its unvaried, unrelieved effect is like Wotan with a hangover. He is surely too lugubrious for the ‘gentle fragrance’ of the lighter Rückert-Lieder – though the low keys chosen don’t help – and as a consequence the two introverted songs in the cycle feel heavily dragged beyond their natural phrase lengths. Slightly unsteady in the lower ranges of the slower songs and stretched by the upper reaches likewise, he is almost drowned at the climax of ‘Um Mitternacht’, where the lower winds of the Tasmanian SO make the most of Mahler’s glissando instructions to unsettling effect.

This may be one reason why Tahu Rhodes reverts to the piano version of Kindertotenlieder, though Sharolyn Kimmorley’s piano sounds closer to the mic than he does. Here again, however, a brief comparison with Christian Gerhaher’s recent recording will show what’s missing. Without a more detailed response to the text, the inward quality of Gerhaher’s projection becomes maudlin here; though ‘Wenn dein Mütterlein’ trips along, the rhythm sags and deprives the song of its concluding twist. Singing at the same pitch, Gerhaher sounds much higher – not necessarily an advantage, though his articulation is, understandably, more evidently native – but at every turn digs deeper.