Dorothea Röschmann's UK appearances have to date been few and far between. This is a shame, for the young German soprano is one of the most immaculate singers of our time, and we need to hear more of her.
At her festival debut she held the audience spellbound, her magnetism the result of a consummate artistry that makes her the model Lieder interpreter. She is extraordinarily still on the platform, never indulging in self-conscious dramatisation, simply letting her voice - a gorgeous, subtly inflected mix of gold and smoke - do all the work.
The first half of her programme consisted of Schubert and Schumann. A sequence of the former's evocations of night, their long lines flawlessly spun, was contrasted with the declamatory fierceness of Schumann's Burns settings from Myrthen.
Then came songs by Fauré: Clair de Lune, delivered with a gilded sensuousness; Les Berceaux and Au Cimetière, flooded with quiet melancholy.
She closed with Strauss, letting her voice soar with expansive yet quiet tenderness in a way that was simply heartbreaking, before plunging into the domestic comedy of Schlechtes Wetter with glorious irony and wit.
A lustrous, sumptuous evocation of the "splendeurs inconnues" (unknown splendours) of Fauré's Après un R ve was among her encores. At a festival in which there have been a number of remarkable debuts, this was perhaps the most outstanding of them all.
