Collectively titled ‘Longing’, this album juxtaposes songs by Strauss, Berg and Schoenberg written between 1885 and 1948 – encompassing two world wars and many sea changes in Germanic culture. Nonetheless, the song selections flow together with a surprisingly consistent sensibility, partly because the central theme is longing but also thanks to the common musical roots among these composers. Echoes of Mendelssohn are heard in some of Strauss’s earlier works, and Berg’s Seven Early Songs stand at the precipice of atonality – amid a common ground that includes the expansive poetic leeway opened up by Wagner with word-setting liberated from the usual symmetry, plus intensified harmonic heat for all emotional states. The piano/voice version of Strauss’s 1948 Four Last Songs, shorn of its sumptuous orchestration, sits easily next to the same composer’s 1885 ‘Zueignung’. So do the emotional thickets of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, as heard in a beginning state of growth in his Vier Lieder, Op 2. Has any other recital accomplished this conceptual feat?

One wonders, however, why Lucy Crowe signed on for the project. Qualities that make her one of our era’s best Baroque singers – her instinctive feel for Handel’s vocal contours, for example – don’t serve her in this repertoire. Her high-tension leaps into her upper range that are so thrilling in her recent Rodelinda (7/21) sound laboured in the sustained upper reaches of Strauss. She also pushes her voice towards a more robust tone quality that just isn’t there. Crowe has all of the necessary notes for the Four Last Songs but none of them float. (Barbara Bonney is a better choice for the piano version – Decca, 5/99). Best not to compare her somewhat monochrome ‘Zueignung’, for example, to Håkan Hagegård’s eloquent vocal shading (BIS, 5/94).

Crowe’s low-vibrato vocal precision is a plus for bringing clarity to the mysteries in Schoenberg’s Op 2, though her best moments are in Berg’s songs. Those more serpentine vocal lines do seem worked into her voice – discreet portamento and all – in ways that much of the Strauss is not, giving interpretative freedom allowing her to bring confiding intimacy to ‘Die Nachtigall’.

With a dry-sounding piano that sounds like a period instrument, Anna Tilbrook successfully reimagines music often heard in orchestral versions, especially by revealing the inner workings of the Four Last Songs. The long opening of ‘Im Abendrot’ becomes much more an inward contemplation than a rapturous vision experienced on the outside. In the extended postlude, the lark-like trills have even more impact than in the orchestral version because they have less sonic competition from the notes around them. Since the Four Last Songs reflect a lifetime of experience, the art of suggestion is paramount here, and Tilbrook has it.