I’m sorry to begin in captious vein, but here goes. Anyone buying this ‘blind’ might expect 18 different songs. Instead what we get are just nine of the 19 songs Chopin composed spasmodically over two decades, sung both in their Polish originals and in the German translations made after Chopin’s death. Even with this double helping of identical music, the total timing is hardly generous; and while there are useful notes by John Allison, the booklet stints on English translations – indispensable with such little-known repertoire. Why, I wonder, didn’t the Chopin Institute issue all 19 songs, shared between soprano and baritone, and forget the German versions recorded in the dubious name of ‘completeness’?

These gripes aside, the performances are a delight, ideally scaled to these charming (occasionally more than that) shavings from Chopin’s workbench. Designed for amateurs rather than opera stars on their nights off, most of the songs are simple strophic settings in the tradition of the French romance, replete with folksong echoes and the lilt of waltz and mazurka. Dorothée Mields’s pellucid soprano, verbal sensitivity and unexaggerated response to mood and character make her a well-nigh ideal interpreter, whether of the bittersweet ‘The Sad Stream’, the incantatory ‘I want what I have not’, with its mournfully curling melismas, or the two grim threnodies for the fall of Poland.

While her German diction is a model of clarity, the dark vowels and flavoursome consonants of Polish seem to inspire Mields to an extra expressive intensity: the bel canto patriotic lament ‘Melodya’ (Chopin’s last and arguably most moving song) is more fervent than in its German incarnation, while the love song-waltz ‘The Wish’ becomes more teasingly seductive. Playing an overtone-rich 1848 Pleyel, Nelson Goerner, too, brings an added freedom and subtlety of nuance to the Polish originals. I just wish I wasn’t left with a nagging sense of having been short-changed.