Schumann’s final songs, settings of poems attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, were long routinely dismissed as the products of a tired, sick mind. Yet in a fine performance, as here, their almost minimalistic starkness can be uncommonly moving. Several years after her retirement from the concert platform, Ann Murray sings with still-steady tone, sensitive phrasing and a quiet, concentrated intensity, flaring into passion in the central ‘An die Königin Elisabeth’ and culminating in a hypnotic, otherworldly ‘Gebet’ as Mary prays for deliverance. Here, and elsewhere, Murray has the art of increasing the tension without raising the volume.

Ideally, Mignon’s four songs call for a purer, more youthful timbre than Murray’s. But if she is stretched by the high-lying climaxes of ‘Kennst du das Land’, she touchingly embodies the mysterious girl’s vulnerability and vaguely defined longings, using her mezzo depth to advantage in the declamatory, proto-Wagnerian ‘Heiss mich nicht reden’. And given every encouragement by Malcolm Martineau’s deft pianism, she brings a coquettish charm, without winsomeness, to the song of the flighty actress Philine, first cousin to Strauss’s Zerbinetta.

Interleaved with the Mignon songs are those of the blind old Harper, Mignon’s father (though neither one knows it), sung with unsentimental gravitas by the impressive young baritone Benjamin Appl. With clear, incisive diction, he characterises vividly in the narrative ‘Ballade des Harfners’ and catches both the Lear-like weariness of soul and the accusatory bitterness of ‘Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt’. In a clutch of duets – Schumann at his most beguilingly gemütlich – Murray combines agreeably with Appl, John Mark Ainsley and her son Johnny Langridge, an apt choice for the mellifluous ‘Familien-Gemälde’ (‘Family Portrait’). On her own she rounds off this thoughtfully planned recital with a group of popular Brahms songs, sung with subtle understanding and an unerring feeling for Brahmsian rubato. If Murray sounds a touch raw in the unbridled ‘Meine Liebe ist grün’, there is rich compensation in a deeply felt, broadly phrased performance of ‘Wie Melodien’, or a delicately timed and inflected ‘Ständchen’, where, characteristically, Martineau’s point and wit contribute much to the song’s success.