If you find yourself torn between a smoke-and-whisky-pickled cabaret take on Kurt Weill’s ballet-with-song Die sieben Todsünden (‘The Seven Deadly Sins’) and a sleek operatic version, the Norwegian mezzo-soprano Tora Augestad might offer an appealing compromise. Trained both in jazz and classical styles, with a new-music-focused career that straddles the two, Augestad gamely walks the line in Weill’s darkly sardonic parable about capitalism. Singing in the original high key, she starts off playing the straight man to Joshua Weilerstein and the Oslo Philharmonic’s knowing, white-faced clown. But if she starts at a remove, as though watching the action from high above, as the Annas’ situation intensifies she gradually becomes more involved, culminating in a ‘Neid’ of grotesque cruelty – tonally distorted, a forced musical confession. The shift highlights the duality of a piece about split selves, enacting the subtle tug and pull as Anna I presses her advantage over Anna II.

Augestad’s is an efficient, adaptable voice, as we hear in a programme that also includes Marcus Paus’s Hate Songs and five songs by Charles Ives. It hasn’t got quite the gloss and glow of Anne Sophie von Otter (DG), nor does her delivery achieve anything close to the tonal depth and ease of Brigitte Fassbaender (Harmonia Mundi), but it offers something closer to cabaret than either – a more inflected, theatrical take on Brecht’s bitter text.

The Weill is the pick of the disc. Paus’s Hate Songs – settings of deliciously acid Dorothy Parker texts dismantling every male stereotype in the book – is an elegantly orchestrated divertissement but little more. A nod to Bernstein’s I Hate Music! at the start (its memorable opening octave leap self-consciously soured here) sets the tone for a work that’s all aphorism and theatrical gesture, at its best in the satirical cadenzas rather than the sentimental leanings of the songs. Augestad dispatches it cleanly but it leaves little lasting impression, especially when sat alongside the Ives.

It’s here that we really miss the scope of an operatic voice. Augestad’s blanched, brittle instrument floats on the musical surface but never really dives in among John Adams’s lavish orchestrations (a little distant in the mix here), and lacks the vibrato to sustain the long melodies.