Our Recording of the Month is an auspicious debut for MSO Live, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s new house label. Featuring a program of songs by Debussy and Richard Strauss, it’s something of a triumph (MSO Live MSO001).

Recorded live, the album comprises music by two very different composers at opposite ends of their careers. “What binds them together are ravishing performances by Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg and the MSO under Chief Conductor Jaime Martín,” writes Will Yeoman in a five-star review.

First comes Debussy’s youthful Ariettes oubliées in Brett Dean’s masterly orchestrations. “Debussy’s sensitive approach to setting Verlaine finds its twin in Stagg’s sensual, pellucid delivery. If her C’est l’extase langoureuse is all dark-hued languor and Il pleure dans mon cœur drips with an erotic melancholia, Stagg’s L’ombre des arbres recalls the dolorous resignation of Schubert’s wanderer,” says Yeoman. 

As for Strauss’s Four Last Songs: “Stagg – with some extraordinary playing by the MSO under Martín, so expansive yet full of detail – moves effortlessly from the combination of optimism and resignation in Frühling through the pointed temporal meditation of September and the comforting somnolence of Beim Schlafengehen to the wistful radiance of Im Abendrot.”