This recording features Mahler’s greatest champion, Bruno Walter, in collaboration with one of his favourite artists, the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier. It was Walter who introduced Ferrier to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, a work that they were to perform several times together. Mahler had first-hand experience of the song cycle’s tragic subject matter, having lost three brothers in childhood. “Here was potentially one of the great singers of our time”, Walter later said of Kathleen Ferrier, who herself was to be cruelly struck down in her prime with cancer.