The gender-switch in this common title is significant. The homey passing-on tradition, suggested by the many ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me’ collections, is replaced here by American Songbook selections with more worldly expressions of love and loss – clearly suited to veteran soprano Susan Bullock. Many precedents hover over this music: the suave but soulful Frank Sinatra, the more operatically cultivated Audra McDonald plus the urban legends that shade our perceptions of this music. We now know that ‘My funny Valentine’ is what self-tormented lyricist Lorenz Hart saw when looking in the mirror. The affair not quite revealed in ‘One for my baby’ was between lyricist Johnny Mercer and 18-year-old Judy Garland. Originally written as a memorial to the 1950s beat generation, ‘The Ballad of the Sad Young Men’ came to be identified with the repressed 1960s LGBTQ+ community.

How does a voice known for singing Elektra, Isolde and Brünnhilde find its way into this world without revisiting the bad old days of operatic crossover? Bullock successfully scales back, favouring the lower-voice, lower-tension range. It’s clearly not a young voice, though with fine feats of colouring. Contrary to the current Broadway practice of treating lyrics like sentences of inflected speech (McDonald, for example), Bullock reverts to the earlier practice – from the 1940s and ’50s, when many of these songs first became popular – of putting the melodic line first and massaging the lyrics within that framework with occasional departures from the vocal line. The introductory verse that some singers consider to be optional is where Bullock establishes the performance’s overall emotional temperature. Her treatment of the crucial verse to ‘Hello young lovers’ adds immeasurable character information to the well-known song.

In some instances, the song that follows can seem surprisingly inconsequential, as in ‘Bill’, where Bullock backs away from the subtext (heard in the context of Show Boat) of unattainable romantic normality. But here’s where the album’s sequencing comes in: ‘Bill’ is followed by a more upfront expression of loss in ‘A house is not a home’. The rhapsodic ‘All the things you are’ predictably fares far better than the hectic patter of ‘Let’s call the whole thing off’. But the big surprise is Bullock’s quicksilver clarity in Stephen Sondheim and Mary Rodgers’s ‘The boy from …’, a send-up of ‘The girl from Ipanema’ that’s the best on the album and may just be among the most fully realised performances of her career.

Spurring her on is pianist Richard Sisson, an essential catalyst whose accompaniments are full of subtle genius, articulating the rolling arpeggios in ‘Send in the clowns’, supporting Bullock’s styling in the opening moments of ‘I’ve got the world on a string’ and generally revealing the harmonic adeptness of these songwriters. I part company with his bluesy arrangement of ‘One for my baby’ – the bar-room atmosphere disguises the song’s originality – but that’s only one out of 16. The rest of the album may not be for Broadway babies but for those who believe this music is art song.