In his vocal autumn, Robert Holl fields a bass-baritone of slightly grizzled nobility, with impressive sonorous depth. If high notes tend to be raw and effortful, he can turn this to advantage in Brahms’s mighty Vier ernste Gesänge, where he catches all the terrible nihilism and life-weariness of the first two songs and the opening of the third. When in the second song the music descends into the abyss, in comfortless falling thirds, at the words ‘Da lobte ich die Toten’, his hollow tones distil an eerie bleakness rivalled on disc only by his one-time teacher Hans Hotter (EMI). If only Hotter had passed on his command of legato. For all Holl’s evident sincerity, both the assuaging close of the third song and the redemptive vision (‘For now we see through a glass darkly’) in the fourth suffer from his recurrent tendency to swell into individual notes rather than spin a true, bound line. In the latter, where Graham Johnson is dolce, as Brahms requests, Holl sounds uncomfortably stretched by the high tessitura. For veiled inwardness here go to Hotter, Fischer-Dieskau with Barenboim or, my own favourite version, Thomas Quasthoff (both DG).

Given Holl’s vocal timbre, it’s no surprise that songs of regret, resignation and death-longing predominate even more than they do in most Brahms recitals. He is aptly hieratic in the austere, archaic ‘Schwermut’ – one of several Brahmsian rarities here – and ‘Todessehnen’, whose mournful, ritualistic tread recalls the old harper of Schubert’s ‘An die Türen will ich schleichen’. But Holl’s sombre, rather monochrome tone and fondness for slow, ‘backward-leaning’ tempi mean that songs of melancholy or bittersweet nostalgia all too easily become shrouded in Wotanesque gloom: say, in ‘Alte Liebe’, or ‘Mit vierzig Jahren’, where a man in early middle-age casts a rueful glance backwards and looks stoically towards his end.

Elsewhere the enchanting, secretive ‘Sommerfäden’, with its tendrils of Bachian counterpoint, sounds merely lugubrious, despite Graham Johnson’s best efforts. ‘Sapphische Ode’, where the singer must ‘bow’ the line like a cello, suffers more than most songs from Holl’s lack of legato. And while Holl can sensitively soften his tone, his voice never smiles in the few songs where the spirit lightens, notably the waltz-barcarolle ‘Auf dem See’ – compare, say, Fischer-Dieskau (with Barenboim) here, far more joyously animated. Johnson’s fastidiously textured playing, like his detailed commentaries, is always illuminating. Despite my provisos, there is much to admire in the directness and slightly grizzled nobility of Holl’s singing, especially in the Vier ernste Gesänge. But be prepared for a protracted Brahmsian gloomfest.