My Funny Valentine: Frederica von Stade sings Rodgers and Hart is a 69-minute studio album of songs from Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's musicals, performed in historically authentic versions by von Stade, Rosemary Ashe, Peta Bartlett, Lynda Richardson, the Ambrosian Chorus and the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of John McGlinn.

The album was the third that von Stade and McGlinn made together, coming after their recordings of Jerome Kern's Show Boat and Cole Porter's Anything Goes.

Frederica von Stade's anthology of songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart was, he wrote, "well-nigh indispensable".

In her earlier Rodgers album - Erich Kunzel's recording of The Sound of Music - she had not seemed as deeply engaged with Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics as she might have been.

Frederica von Stade's recording offered an engaging programme that blended famous songs with others, like "Atlantic blues", that even some Rodgers devotees would probably never have come across before.

There was "no warmer, no more spiritually aligned opera star today" than von Stade - her Magnolia Hawkes in Show Boat and her Hope Harcourt in Anything Goes were both notable for their "sunniness and generosity of spirit".

It was when Rodgers's music was most in sympathy with her own artistic temperament that her interpretations of his songs were at their best,[5] In "I must love you", for example, she was perfect for the line "And if my life is blessed with joys, I owe each thing to you".

In "A ship without a sail", "that sublime outpouring of pain and loss, she finds a parched, 'lost' sound, tinged with just the right hint of melancholy and self-pity", However, some other numbers were disappointing.

One could hear that von Stade was striving to convey the "underlying masochism or despair" of Hart's dark lyrics - her Mrs Simpson from Pal Joey, for instance, was delivered with a hard-edged tone to express the matriarch's bitterness.

[5] Conducting, John McGlinn was his usual, straightforward self, judicious in his choice of tempos but lacking "a taut inner rhythm in the fast numbers".

It was a pity that he had not encouraged von Stade to make her music more subservient to her texts: it was at those moments when she gave herself permission to bend her line in the interest of her words that she was most evidently the "great, imaginative artist" who was so wonderful in Rossini or Mozart.