The Istanbul-born, Vienna-based tenor Ilker Arcayürek’s Schubert-only debut was well received in these pages, earning an Editor’s Choice (Champs Hill, A/17). This new album, recorded the following year, has waited a couple of years for its release. It looks back even further: to the young singer’s triumph at the International Art Song Competition of the Hugo Wolf Academy in Stuttgart, capturing the programme that Arcayürek and his pianist, Fiona Pollak, developed at the time. It makes for a delightful album, taking core Austro-Hungarian repertoire as its basis but pushing out, too, to further corners of the former empire.

We start and end with Mahler, and the opening performance of the songs that give the album its title shows off the same easy, instinctive manner that characterised Arcayürek’s Schubert. That’s not to say, though, that he doesn’t rise to the drama: his voice, though fundamentally lyrical in character, takes on an extra steel – with hints of a Peter Schreier-like edge to the sound – in ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’. The two Lehár numbers are a delight (why are his songs not programmed more often?), even if one notices a slight congestion in the tenor’s tone here and there.

The other rarities are wonderful, too: a haunting pair of Elegies by Croatian composers new to me, and Ilse Weber’s heartbreaking ‘Lullaby’ (also memorably done, with guitar rather than piano accompaniment, on Anne Sofie von Otter’s ‘Terezín/Theresienstadt’ album – DG, 10/07). Others have perhaps brought more interpretative colour and variation to Wolf, Liszt and Brahms than Arcayürek does to his selection here but his singing is always appealing, his interpretations admirably honest. And a gentle, heartfelt performance of ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ provides a touching conclusion to a lovely album.