What a gorgeous album this is, bursting with birdsong and the fragrances of flowers. American coloratura soprano Erin Morley is a seasoned opera performer, but Rose in Bloom is her debut recital disc. Understandably, there’s no shortage of bel canto fireworks and florid vocalises, courtesy of composers as diverse as Saint-Saëns, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, and Milhaud. Nightingales and other feathered songsters pour forth their souls, as Keats might say, in such an ecstasy.

But there are also songs more firmly in the Lieder tradition, by Berg, Brahms and Zemlinsky. Then there are a couple of lighter numbers which with the recital ends; the last of which, Ivor Novello’s beautiful We’ll Gather Lilacs, finds Morley accompanying herself on piano, allowing voice and opera pedagogue pianist Gerald Martin Moore to rest early his insightful and empathetic musical faculties and simply enjoy the show.

Not that Morley, whose bright, flexible soprano is a remarkable instrument and is as capable of responding to the greatest technical challenges as it is to the most subtle and complex interpretative problems, is the only...