Lott and Johnson again put us in their debt with a disc full of insights, featuring some of his most popular songs, and others less well-known – deservedly so in some cases, such as the mock-Alsatian song, Ach, was Kummer, Strauss at his most coy. On the other hand, in his 1918 settings of some of Ophelia’s wandering thoughts, performed near the end of the disc, Strauss caught very precisely in voice and piano Ophelia’s lunatic state of mind, and his interpreters offer a performance of answering empathy. After that, and aptly, all we hear, as an envoi, is the composer’s most frequently performed song, the seemingly timeless Morgen, to which Dame Felicity brings just the right serene yet plaintive tone.

Throughout she seems, by and large, to be defying the years in her clear, beautiful singing, something near ideal for Strauss. At the start, she and her nimble pianist find just the right light, airy touch for the immortal Ständchen, but Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter is a trifle wanting in humour. With Der Verschwiegenen she really strikes form and the succeeding songs, culminating in a deeply felt account of the deeply troubling Ruhe, meine Seele and lyrically forthright in the lovely Allerseelen, followed by a pleasingly restrained, almost chaste account of the effusively ecstatic Zueignung.

There we come across what is possibly the recital’s Achilles Heel, the fact that so many of these songs are meant for a man’s voice, preferably that of a lyric tenor, such as Peter Anders, Julius Patzak and Fritz Wunderlich. Cäcilie just fails in catching the requisite ardour. The blatantly erotic Das Rosenband is obviously a man’s song. By contrast Lott is not only well suited by the character of songs expressly written for a female singer, such as Meinem Kinde, Wiegenlied and Muttertandelei but also brings to them all her gifts of enfolding sound, where she needs fear no comparison with either other singers or her younger self and where her partner is at his fluent best.