...[T]he rarer songs which Behrens uncovers are discoveries indeed... Behrens...anchors her selection with stalwarts like Mignons Lied, Die Loreley and Freudvoll und Leidvoll... Behrens's radiance of tone and effortless ebb and flow of legato phrasing offers something unique both [in Mignon] and in the hypnotically oscillating Loreley. With Cord Garben's most delicately inflected accompaniment, wonder swiftly modulates to fear and dream.

The collection, which is ordered to make a particularly satisfying armchair recital, is important for its inclusion of three long scenae. The Dumas Jeanne d'Arc au bucher was orchestrated by Liszt, but this later piano-accompanied version which he made in 1874 is haunting in the austerity of its dependence on a single rising diminished minor arpeggio which bears the spare, folk-like melody on to its major apotheosis in a call to patriotic action. La perla, a naively extended metaphor of the female condition, with words by the Princess von Hohenlohe, is another late work which finds out deliciously the contemplative lower regions of Behrens's voice; while Die Fischerstochter moves thrilling from a tremulous, unashamedly Schubertian expectancy to a near-Wagnerian breadth of rhapsody and rapture. Too late, alas, for the 1986 Critics' Choice; but this is where that recording belongs.

-- Hilary Finch, Gramophone [1/1987]