Famed above all as a delectable Mozart singer, Miah Persson has also made her mark as a thoughtful recitalist. As these female portraits by Robert and Clara Schumann reveal, her naturally sweet, gleaming tone can encompass deeper, more sensuous shadings, as in her dreamy ‘Die Lotosblume’. Persson proves an ideal advocate of Clara’s often underrated Lieder, vivid in the story-telling of ‘Loreley’, all breathless excitement in the Mendelssohnian ‘Liebeszauber’, true and tender in the dulcet ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’. In Robert’s ‘Lied der Suleika’ her unvaried brightness rather misses the song’s innigkeit. Elsewhere – say, in ‘Der Nussbaum’, or a deeply felt ‘Lied der Braut’ – she can swell into individual notes at the expense of a pure legato. But her mingled sensitivity and immediacy are always compelling, not least in the stark, spare Maria Stuart cycle.

In Frauenliebe und ‑leben Persson’s youthful freshness of tone and eagerness of manner are constant assets. No performance of these songs could be less mawkish or matronly. Abetted by the sentient playing of Joseph Breinl, Persson touchingly conveys a journey from shy, dazed innocence (the opening song, in sarabande rhythm, is kept well moving), through excitement and joy in motherhood, to the shock of bereavement. The second song is fast and elated, more lebhaft than innig. (Persson seems more confident than most singers that she will win her paragon of manhood.) But she is ideally rapt and inward in No 6, where the woman confides her pregnancy to her husband, and lives the tragic final song intensely, the accusatory bitterness of the opening heralded by a keyboard sforzando that cuts like a knife. The recording picks up rather too much of the Stockholm hall’s empty resonance, though this hardly diminishes pleasure in an enterprising recital from a soprano of charm, intelligence and natural communicative gifts.