Nineteen-sixty-five was the year which brought Fischer-Dieskau to Aldeburgh. More surprisingly, it brought Brahms also (Brahms being the composer of whom Britten said that he liked a little every now and again to remind himself how bad he was). The 15 Romances comprising what we know as Die schöne Magelone were at that time a rarity, so that the prospect of a performance by Fischer-Dieskau with Sviatoslav Richter was a major event. Britten turned the pages.

It comes now to a subtler form of life than it had probably ever enjoyed before, and indeed this is a more totally satisfying version than even Fischer-Dieskau’s studio recordings with Richter and Barenboim. The hearty, roistering mode of the opening moves almost immediately through a kaleidoscope of changes, with the tenderest expression irradiating the third song (“Sind es Schmerzen”), the simplest, most transparent texture in the Schumannesque fourth (“Liebe kam aus fernen Landen”) and a magical sense of gentle movement downstream in the one famous song, “Ruhe, Süssliebchen”. In all of those great handfuls of notes which Brahms confers upon the pianist with such largesse, Richter never smudges or lets slip a single one, and the two great artists work together as though this were the performance of a single mind.

And so it is, though in a very different style, with the Schubert group dating from a concert in 1972. The eager tread and silvery tone of “Der Wanderer an den Mond” will remain a precious memory, as will the other “Wanderer” song, the relatively unfamiliar D649. All here is in the finest spirit of music-making, the superb professionalism not quenching the love, freshness and intimacy of (in the literal sense) the amateur.