For most singers of Die schöne Müllerin, the progress from the firm step of the opening song to the final lullaby is a movement from innocence through hurt love and rejection to despair. Ian Bostridge seems to regard the cycle not so much narratively as in retrospect, as if the whole were the experience of loss, relived wistfully when not in actual pain. His particular vocal timbre is suited to this approach, and it is as we reach the later songs that the anguish increasingly matches the voice and the songs are most effectively sung. So the opening three songs, ‘Das Wandern’, ‘Wohin’ and ‘Halt!’, largely forfeit the naive in favour of the sentimental (in Schiller’s sense), that is to say they exchange freshness and immediacy for something more considered and even self-conscious.

Matters improve (that is, if one resists this approach) with a beautiful performance of ‘Danksagung an den Bach’, when the brook in the verse, rather than being joyfully observed, is addressed in poetic terms as leading to the girl; and Mitsuko Uchida, a sympathetic pianist throughout the cycle, plays the accompaniment with great tenderness. ‘Des Müllers Blumen’ and ‘Tränenregen’, as the boy and the girl draw close together, are sung in an almost dream-like state; and in the latter Uchida, who takes the option of cutting the four-bar prelude between verses, plays the postlude movingly. Bostridge sings ‘Der Jäger’ almost tonelessly in his tearing anguish at the rival’s appearance, then turns back to a most elegant, and eloquent, singing of ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’, adding a sense of shock for the faded flowers of ‘Trockne Blumen’.

It is a thoughtful performance, from both artists, though there is sometimes a sense that Uchida would have preferred a little more room for the phrases she understands so well. Perhaps the loss of freshness in the earlier part of the cycle may not make this one’s first choice as a performance to live with, but it is certainly well worth hearing and studying.