Alder needs her linguistic wits about her – pianist Joseph Middleton too as he responds to or prefigures her changing colours and inflections. Both triumph across a nightscape in which dreaming weaves a potent Leitmotiv…Best of all is the Britten.

Alder’s recording presence moves into a considerably higher gear with this release – not her first recital disc but one distinctively curated to further tap into her intelligence, remarkable linguistic range and emotionally vibrant instincts (while mostly avoiding the long shadows of singers who came before her in this music)...the mind behind the voice expresses itself with exceptional precision and commitment, without short cuts or mannerisms.

Many of the songs here are associated with darker, heavier voices, but she rises to their challenges quite superbly and the programme as a whole reveals an array of intriguing new colours and textures in the voice which look set to take her into pastures new in terms of operatic roles over the coming years. And there’s certainly plenty for Middleton to get his teeth into here, especially in the Rachmaninov songs.

Her light lyric soprano is closer to that of Joan Rodgers than to [Vishnevskaya], but her artistry is such that she deploys a wide-ranging colour...With Joseph Middleton her sensitive pianist, Alder is as compelling in poetry of loss and despair as she is in Tchaikovsky’s airy Rondel or Grieg’s carefree Lauf der Welt, her tone always as lovely as her diction is clear.

Alder is in glorious voice, her soprano fresh and untethered; the assurance of youth and the doubt born of experience come across equally convincingly. Her high notes gleam, and her words are direct and communicative, whether in Russian, Swedish, German or French. Middleton’s playing fills in everything those words can’t say, perfectly calibrated to support Alder but huge in its expressive scope.

Alder and her marvellously resourceful and imaginative pianist, Joseph Middleton, have devised a strikingly original programme that travels through Russia and Scandinavia with songs both familiar and unfamiliar...She has a beautifully clean, even and shining lyric soprano that projects with crystalline clarity. More than that, she engages emotionally with what she sings, shaping vocal lines with rare sensitivity and a wide range of colours.