With Thomas Quasthoff retired, many would nominate Christian Gerhaher as today’s pre-eminent German Lieder baritone (the more controversial Goerne is the other obvious choice). He certainly lives up to his reputation in this Mahler disc, recorded at concerts in the fine, spacious acoustic of Montreal’s new Maison Symphonique. As ever, Gerhaher combines vocal beauty and acute sensitivity to verbal and musical nuance with a certain patrician restraint. In the Kindertotenlieder, Gerhaher is less searing than Fischer-Dieskau, 1963 vintage (with Böhm, DG), Janet Baker (with Barbirolli, EMI) or Brigitte Fassbaender (with Chailly, Decca). But his concentrated inwardness is intensely moving, whether in the shifts between desolation and aching tenderness in ‘Nun seh’ ich wohl’, or the sudden stab of anguish in ‘Wenn dein Mütterlein’ at the words ‘O du, des Vaters Zelle’, all the more shocking amid so much rarefied gentleness. For the transfigured close of the final song, Gerhaher finds an other-worldly pianissimo and a quality of spirituality. The Montreal orchestra (superlative wind solos) match the baritone in their sentient, compassionate playing, while Nagano keeps textures lucid in music where the voice is often treated as another instrument in the intricate contrapuntal weave.

Gerhaher also catches vividly, yet without exaggeration, the flux of emotions in the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Nowhere is there a hint of melodrama or sentimentality. He smiles through heartache in the second song, where his top register rings out freely, never forces his tone in the expression of anguish in the violent third song (Nagano makes the most of Mahler’s minatory, hard-edged orchestral colours here), and captures both the initial spiritual innocence and the unearthly close of ‘Die zwei blauen Augen’, the final notes barely breathed.

In the Rückert-Lieder, Gerhaher has a similar knack of finding the right spirit and colour for each song. He sings a fleet, deftly pointed ‘Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder’ and a dreamily withdrawn ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’. For all his sensitivity, ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ arguably needs a broader tempo to realise all of its self-communing rapture (compare Baker and Fischer-Dieskau). But the flowing tempo for ‘Um Mitternacht’ works well. Gerhaher is hushed and fearful at the opening, warms to a rounded, ardent forte as the music moves from minor to major, and clinches the high-lying climax without forcing, helped by the careful balancing of brass and wind against the voice. The microphones pick up Barbirolli-style grunts and mumbles from Nagano. But that niggle hardly compromises one of the finest baritone versions of these cycles since Fischer-Dieskau. Gerhaher’s many fans will need no encouragement.