The raison d’être for this recording is both a thank-you to Hendricks’s Nordic fans and a desire to bring these songs before a wider audience. As Robert Layton rightly says in his booklet notes, Nordic languages have militated against Nordic songs achieving the popularity of the Lied or chanson. Hendricks here proves to be an ideal advocacte for them.

Her opening sequence of Nielsen songs (dating from between 1894, Apple blossom, and 1916, Study from Nature) is simply radiant – or radiantly simple? – a perfect preparation for her choice of some of Grieg’s best-loved songs. Performances are wonderfully characterised, the inclusion of the Op 48 songs, German settings all, signal that Nordic song mastery travels beyond its own borders.

Like the others here, Sweden’s Ture Rangström was a natural songwriter. His five settings of Bo Bergman – a poet who drew the best out of him – though not overshadowed in this company, are perhaps less distinctively individual. Not so the five well-known Sibelius settings, of which rival versions are legion. Von Otter on various DG albums is perhaps the benchmark but Hendricks delivers these beautifully.

Collectors will want this disc for the otherwise unavailable Nielsen Shall the flowers wither, then?, The Hawk and Study from Nature, and the full Rangström set with piano accompaniment. Hendricks’s performances, wonderfully supported by Roland Pöntinen, more than stand comparison with those of von Otter, Groop and Bonney (or even ones unlisted above such as Kringelborn). For those not so familiar with Nordic song, this new disc makes as excellent an introduction as one could wish for. It is a shame room could not have been found for some from the fifth Nordic nation, Iceland. The brief, if lovely, Swedish folksong that rounds the disc off does not really compensate.