For all of her vocal cultivation, personal magnetism and musical intelligence, Miah Persson seems not to be a born recitalist: her bright, lyric soprano voice hasn’t the sort of colourisitic range that accomodates levels of gravitas needed in a medium where the voice is so laid bare as an expressive entity. That doesn’t mean – on the evidence presented on this disc and her previous all-Schumann recital (BIS, 11/11) – that she can’t create some compelling performances on her own terms (especially with such a sympathetic collaboration with pianist Roger Vignoles), even if the more intense moments in her chosen repertoire make her force her voice well beyond its comfort zone.

Her calling card is the opening Schubert song, ‘Suleika I’. Vignoles’s opening flourish beautifully embodies the ‘east wind’ in the verse’s opening stanza while Persson creates an ever-evolving journey of emotional states described through descriptions of fields, vines, walls and the sun. Even in often-recorded items such as ‘Du bist die Ruh’, Persson’s beautifully sustained line and unindulgent tempo (her version is a full minute shorter than Renée Fleming’s on Decca) are a thoroughly satisfying package. ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ is a model of how a mid-weight voice can scale the song’s peaks thanks to an inner conviction and trusting how the notes and words can shoulder the dramatic weight. Her voice is nearly ideal for ‘The Shepherd on the Rock’, her reading being most distinguished in the middle section that convey’s the depths of the protagonist’s longing. But her ‘Rastlose Liebe’ is best heard without fresh memories of the profound sorrow conveyed by Dame Janet Baker (EMI).

The Grieg and Sibelius groups are full of mixed blessings. So beautiful is her enunciation in the Swedish-language Sibelius songs that you could take phonetic dictation from her performances. The songs themselves go to brutal depths – ‘Säf, säf, susa’ concerns the wilful destruction of beauty and ‘Flickan kom’ ends with a woman asking to be buried alive – so her moments of less-than-gracious vocalism are more at home here. The Grieg songs show signs of vocal tiring: Perssson sometimes navigates upward vocal leaps by pushing the volume in what sounds more like a vocal necessity than an interpretative choice. In ‘Die verschwiegene Nachtigall’, though, one can hardly imagine a more alluring nightingale song.