It’s quarter of a century since Ian Bostridge burst on to the scene with his first recording of Die schöne Müllerin, recorded with Graham Johnson as Hyperion’s Schubert song edition reached the home straight. Another recording, with Mitsuko Uchida, followed a decade later (EMI/Warner, 5/05), and now the tenor returns to it for Pentatone, in a recording captured live at Wigmore Hall in the spring of 2019.

As with his most recent return to Winterreise (A/19), it makes for fascinating listening, offering a compelling synthesis of several decades’ engagement with the work. And his partnership with pianist Saskia Giorgini proves inspired. If Johnson and Uchida were reined in on Bostridge’s previous recordings, Giorgini plays an active role here in creating a vividly (psycho-)dramatic world. If Bostridge’s first Müllerin is remarkable for its daintiness and tenderness, his newest feels powerfully alive.

There’s a bracing robustness right from the start, with a certain bitterness never far from the surface, a sense of dramatic Schwung where previously one felt mainly musical momentum. The mill wheel of ‘Halt!’ has almost tangible weight, ‘Mein!’ bristles with impetuosity and desperation, while ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’ bursts out of the blocks full of the scorn that has been building up in the two preceding numbers.

There’s a special wistfulness to ‘Morgengruss’ and a notable sense of fragmentation in ‘Der Neugierige’, as well as some unexpected little interpretative touches: the slight pushing forwards towards the end of ‘Tränenregen’, for example, before Giorgini’s tender account of the little postlude. Indeed, the wealth of interpretative imagination is striking and only occasionally distracting, feeling a little out of place in the final songs: ‘Trockne Blumen’ has a powerful intensity, but in ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ I find the tentative, restrained approach of Bostridge’s earlier recordings more affecting.

Comparisons also reveal that the years have robbed the voice of some of its sweetness and sap; and there are hints of tiredness in, for example, a slightly flustered-sounding ‘Ungeduld’. But such quibbles are minor when it comes to the compelling whole. With excellent recorded sound, this is a moving and thought-provoking new recording of this ever-rewarding cycle.