“Last-minute substitutions for an absentee artist can, on occasion, cause a sensation, and anyone who heard this recital, in which Elizabeth Watts replaced Dorothea Röschmann to join Christopher Maltman and Roger Vignoles for an all-Strauss programme, is unlikely to forget it. Watts, winner of the lieder prize at Cardiff Singer of the World in 2007, is already a major artist. But this struck me as marking a transformation from a good singer into a great one, as well as allowing us to hear her in music she seems to have been born to sing.

Watts has the right tonal glamour for Strauss, along with that tricky combination of vocal ease and immaculate control that his work requires. She also has a nice way with words, so that the suggestiveness of songs such as Leises Lied and Wiegenlied was ecstatically entwined with their hovering vocal lines.”

– Tim Ashley, The Guardian