Ten years ago Soile Isokoski won the Editor’s Choice Gramophone Award for Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (4/02) and this follow-up disc of Strauss with orchestra has been a long time coming. The main attraction of the programme is the Drei Hymnen, which do not come round in recordings very often. At over 20 minutes, they are almost as substantial as the Vier letzte Lieder, even if they have never attained the same popularity. Hölderlin’s poems are rather pretentious and Strauss responded with music that finds it difficult to settle, except in the ravishing, gentle ecstasy of the middle song, the loveliest of the three. Isokoski is highly sensitive in that, nicely set off against the flickering detail of the luminous orchestral accompaniment, and rises well to the more dramatic demands of the outer songs, where there are echoes of Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Frau ohne Schatten.

The rest of the disc comprises excerpts from Isokoski’s Strauss roles on stage. As each of her three Straussian heroines, she embodies a very touching, human vulnerability – warm-hearted as Ariadne, wistful as the Marschallin and quietly reflective as the Countess in Capriccio, though she and Kamu get nothing like the variety out of the closing scene that Schwarzkopf and Karajan do. The two extracts from Der Rosenkavalier come in the wrong order and are presented crudely as ‘bleeding chunks’. Overall, this disc is not quite at the high level of its Award-winning predecessor – Isokoski’s vibrato is sometimes more intrusive and Kamu is less inspiring a Straussian than Janowski was – but it is a welcome addition to the Strauss discography none the less. Many collectors may feel it is worth having for the Drei Hymnen alone.