Ferrier’s performance of this cycle (“Songs on the Death of Children”) helped to break open firmly-entrenched prejudices about how it should be performed, prejudices that even date from Mahler himself. When he finished the piece in 1905, Mahler insisted that it should only be sung by a man, seeking to distance himself from the antisemitically-barbed charges of sentimentality and overwroughtness that he often received. But performances like this one eventually proved to be too good and these prejudices against Mahler too thin; even though the work is written from the perspective of a grieving father, the most famous performances of it (this one and Janet Baker’s with John Barbirolli) are now by women. Ferrier’s astonishingly beautiful contralto makes particularly vivid the piece’s sense of psychological dissonance, where images of painful disorientation lurk just beneath a restrained surface.