Tim Ashley
The Guardian
September 2004

Soprano Emma Bell is so closely associated with Baroque music that this foray into some of the lesser-known regions of post-Romanticism will doubtless take many by surprise. The centrepiece is a rare complete performance of Strauss's Mädchenblumen—a glorious cycle, despite its naff text, which eulogises women by comparing them to flowers. Joseph Marx's songs, once popular with divas, have fallen out of favour of late; they prove to be torridly chromatic pieces, by turns mystic and erotic. We also tend to forget, nowadays, that Bruno Walter was a composer as well as a conductor, though his songs—inevitably, perhaps—sound very like those of Mahler, his great hero. As always with Bell, you're left slightly in awe of the sumptuousness of her voice and its tremendous agility over a colossal range, while her pianist Andrew West is suitably impassioned throughout. A treat.