In a class by itself? That well-worn cliché kept surfacing during multiple listenings to this new recording, which promises to be the first of many lieder discs leading up to the 200th anniversary of Schubert’s death in 2028. The many great Die schöne Müllerin recordings – a cycle of 20 Wilhelm Müller poems tracing the innocence-to-suicide romantic disappointment of a young miller – aren’t displaced here but rather complemented by the highly personal but well-studied phrase readings of baritone Samuel Hasselhorn and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz, delivered without the weight of tradition or revisionism. The approach is simply an unselfconscious view of what they believe the cycle is saying – recorded by Harmonia Mundi with extraordinarily lustrous clarity.

The romantic triangle of the Miller, his loved one and the hunter that she prefers is secondary here. ‘Since he does not fit the prevailing norms, he is ostracised simply because of his individuality, which in this case represents “otherness”; a social exclusion that will drive him to despair’, writes Hasselhorn in the booklet. Actually, the concept goes well beyond that, and into a kind of mystical redemption in the final two songs. The poetic exchanges between the Miller and the brook in the penultimate song have Hasselhorn adopting a meticulously crafted vocal colour for the words of the benevolent but not remotely sentimental brook – especially effective in the line ‘The angels cut off their wings and every morning descend to earth’, assuring that the miller’s tragedy has not gone unnoticed. Throughout, Hasselhorn’s wide-ranging vocal colours grow organically out of what came before with a treatment of the words that seems spontaneous and almost conversational. Schubert’s Miller isn’t presented to the listener as some Biedermeier specimen; he is right here and speaking directly.

The performance also addresses another concern: why would a composer of Schubert’s literary sensibility set multiple stanzas of text to the same music, starting with the opening song ‘Das Wandern’? Rhapsodising over grinding millstones, for example, makes little sense sung to the same sprightly music of the first stanza. Here, each stanza has significant shifts of vocal colour, phrase organisation and tempo. Milestone tempos are especially broad. Did Schubert write it that way? Not in my score. But did Schubert feel it that way? This performance told me he did.

As the cycle’s emotional catastrophe builds, normally innocent expressions from the Miller have an angry undercurrent as well as other psychological complexities. Bushakevitz has an equal role in all of this. The expressionistic imagery in the text and idyllic veneer in the music of ‘Tränenregen’ is further enriched by the inquisitive treatment of the piano ritornello. The simulated lute strumming in ‘Pause’ subtly expresses the Miller’s growing realisation of the crisis to come. Some songs such as ‘Ungeduld’ are written in broad strokes that can be wearisome on repeated hearings, but the real-time emotions and flexible tempos of singer and pianist make this an entirely fresh experience. If there’s a slight let-down in the recording, it’s the final song, ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’, which they treat like the funeral march that it is but without the sort of imagination that might raise the dead, as does nearly every other song in this distinguished recording.