On this generous offering, Thomas Quasthoff presents his many admirers with a cornucopia of pleasurable, intelligent music-making in a judiciously varied recital. Such are his gifts as a singer and as an interpreter that one could just sit back and revel in his glorious voice, his subtle colouring of tone and his virtually infallible technique, but that would be to overlook his astonishing ability to match the varied styles of his chosen composers.

All that is exemplified in his accounts of Schubert’s Im Frühling and Auf der Bruck, both settings of Schulze, on successive tracks. In the first we hear the soulful intimacies of a sensitive lover musing on his situation; in the other, a strong-willed suitor seeking reunion with his partner. Each is brought unerringly before us by both singer and his ever-thoughtful, highly skilled pianist. Then comes the rapt beauty of Im Abendrot, a reading ideally expounded in long-breathed sentences.

Schumann’s Belsatzar discloses another facet of Quasthoff’s far-ranging art – the ability to catch the listener’s attention by vivid storytelling, the mood of the doomed ruler aptly portrayed in all his hubris, until shivers come into both the writing and the singer’s interpretation when the terrible words appear on the wall. In quite a different tale, the Scottish-derived Tom der Reimer of Loewe, Quasthoff adopts a suitably airy, smiling manner to depict the ballad’s glittering fantasy.

Then we are easily transported into the healing world of Wolf’s Mörike setting about the rising spirits of a convalescent, where the singing is wonderfully broad and easeful, just as the humour of ‘Storchenbotshaft’ is naturally enacted. Even in the well-known Strauss numbers, Quasthoff need have no fear of comparison with the famous of the past, particularly in Heimliche Aufforderung, where his ardour is second to none. Morgen is properly serene though here, as elsewhere, I am slightly troubled by the downward transposition.

There’s an unexpected bonus in a heart-warming, entirely idiomatic account of Danny Boy, Quasthoff quite at home in American-tinged English. The recording is faultless. A small complaint: why is the eminent pianist’s name given in such small print? He adds so much to the disc’s success that he deserved better.