Emma Bell - Songs by Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter and Joseph Marx - The Scotsman

There's nothing unfamiliar about songs by Richard Strauss, but those by Bruno Walter and Joseph Marx, his younger contemporaries, provide an edge to this succulent disc from soprano Emma Bell and pianist Andrew West. Walter's settings here of Heine and Julius Wolff have that poignant delirium of post-Romantic, early 20th-century Austrian modernism. As for the rare Strauss songs included here, Bell combines delicacy with moments of unadulterated ecstasy.