Some three years after I gave a warm welcome to Kateřina Kněžíková‘s superb first solo album on Supraphon – a seductive selection of Martinů, Ravel, Duparc and Szymanowski (9/21) – here comes a mouth-watering follow-up. The programming for this Strauss album is more conventional, perhaps, but it’s a selection that proves hardly less effective as a showcase for the Czech soprano’s beautiful voice, with Jakub Hrůša, Covent Garden’s music director-elect, offering support both at the piano and on the podium.

Everything on the album was recorded in the Dvořák Hall of the Rudolfinum, the Four Last Songs in September 2021 and the songs with piano earlier this year. And on the whole it’s the late work with orchestra that is the most successful. KněŽíkova and Hrůša present fresh, unmannered and beautifully airy performances. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra provide glorious support – gentle, loving and beautifully textured – against which the soprano can spin her unforced line. Here we celebrate life as much as anticipating death, and though it’s an interpretation unlikely to replace anyone’s favourites – and KněŽíkova’s German could at times be better defined – it’s one I can warmly recommend.

When it comes to the songs with piano – a well-chosen selection spanning most of Strauss’s song-writing career, more reverberantly recorded – matters are a little more complicated. The intervening years, too, seem to have added an extra fruitiness to KněŽíkova’s voice, immediately noticeable in the opening ‘Zueignung’. And while Hrůša reveals himself to be a very handy pianist, his accompaniments can be a little foursquare, especially where a little playfulness is required – where’s the impishness in ‘Ständchen’, for example?

KněŽíkova, her German not always idiomatic, can make slightly heavy weather of the more wordy, playful songs, too; a comparison with the detailed, characterful performances on a similar Decca album from the experienced team of Kiri Te Kanawa and Georg Solti (himself an erstwhile Covent Garden boss, of course) is revealing. The accounts of the slower songs – ‘Die Nacht’, ‘Morgen’ and especially ‘Waldseligkeit’ – are heart-meltingly beautiful but elsewhere there’s a sense that these interpretations need time to develop.

In conclusion, then, a fine Four Last Songs; and, though there’s much to enjoy in the other songs, I’d look elsewhere to hear them with extra focus and character.