Christopher Maltman’s journeyman miller is volatile, susceptible, prone to violent swings between elation and self-communing inwardness, but not one who senses his tragic fate virtually from the outset. With its fine, bright resonance, his virile baritone initially exudes health and an eagerness to seize life. In “Wohin”, the vision of water-sprites prompts a tender, confiding half-voice, while in “Der Neugierige” he questions the brook in tones of mesmeric inwardness, before erupting in an almost delirious “Ungeduld”. Encouraged by Graham Johnson’s luminous cantabile, he ensures that the three leisurely strophic songs that follow never become over-languid and tellingly varies his tone from verse to verse.

After the ecstatic, devil-may-care abandon of “Mein” and the troubled musing of “Pause”, Maltman flares into sarcastic outrage at the appearance of the huntsman. His incisive, muscular timbre here more readily suggests fist-clenched fury than underlying distress and panic – shades of emotion which tenors tend to convey more easily than baritones. But Maltman’s haunted, withdrawn colouring in the final verse of “Die liebe Farbe” has already confirmed the boy’s encroaching derangement; the penultimate “Der Müller und der Bach” is intensely moving in its progression from numb bleakness (created as much by Johnson’s timing and colouring of Schubert’s desultory chords as by Maltman’s blanched tones), through consoling tenderness in the brook’s major-key response, to the final dissolution.

A nit-picking reviewer might point to intermittent moments of flatness, and instances (say, in the ninth song, “Des Müllers Blumen”) where Maltman stresses individual words at the expense of a liquid legato line. But while other singers, tenors especially (Werner Güra and Ian Bostridge to the fore), suggest a more youthfully vulnerable protagonist, Maltman’s ardent, impulsive, intensely “lived” performance, partnered and inspired by the ever-illuminating Johnson, should be heard by anyone who loves the cycle.