Mozart and Strauss's orchestral songs are sublime creations and Christine Schafer has just the right kind of silvery, arctic soprano to tackle them. Schwarzkopf fans will love this disc.

Victoria de los Angeles brings characteristic purity, warmth, and character to these marvellous orchestral songs by composers including Granados and Rodrigo. A performance of rare magic.

Great as Fischer-Dieskau's classic recordings are, I prefer Schrier in Schubert's haunting, melancholy song cycle.

Von Otter is a fine Strauss interpreter. As refined and intelligent as ever, she shines in these beautiful Berg songs, and is revelatory in Korngold.

Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson's untimely death robbed us of one of the most gifted sopranos of recent times. Her performances of her husband's settings of Pablo Neruda poems are almost unbearably poignant.

Grieg was a master of the song form, and these sumptuous orchestral settings are done full justice by the singing of Barbara Bonney.

Nancy Argenta excels in Purcell. This CD, packed with songs spanning the profound, the sacred and the profane, brings the English baroque vividly alive.

Victoria de los Angeles is in luminous form here, thoroughly at home in Canteloube's orchestral song cycle. Recently re-issued at £6 as one of EMI's Great Recordings of the Century.

The great Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya is accompanied on piano by her husband, cello legend Mstislav Rostroprovich, in this intense CD of songs by Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky.

Haunting performances from the early '60s by Christa Ludwig and Fritz Wunderlich, with Otto Klemperer conducting the glowing music.

A revelatory, deliciously nuanced and hugely moving performance by Ian Bostridge brings new life to this enchanting Schubert cycle. If you're new to Lieder you could do worse than to start here.

So good I included it twice, here sung by the wonderful Ian Bostridge. This modern recording is more sumptuous than Pears' classic account above. Ideally one would have both.