These are new translations by Jeremy Sams, commissioned by Christopher Glynn for a modern English-speaking audience. They flow naturally with the music; hearing them, no one should doubt that lieder can successfully be sung in English translation. Listening to this disc, one might even wonder whether Schubert might have preferred that his songs be heard in the audience’s own language.

Poetry in translation creates a new poem, and all translation is a matter of balancing gains and losses. The gains, obviously, are in verbal and dramatic communication of the poems. The losses are of another ‘sense’ conveyed by the sound and the untranslatable subtleties of the original words. The translator’s job is to minimise such losses. As Glynn has noted, translation inevitably entails compromise, but there are also compromises when a song is heard in a foreign language. In the Sams translations there are few arcane word-choices (‘lusty roundelays’ in ‘The Child of the Muses’) or odd locutions. The original combination of words and music will, of course, remain inviolable to many.

The 21 songs are shared between the singers. Roderick Williams applies his warm and supple baritone to 11 of them; Rowan Pierce sings eight. Two of the songs (including the early ‘Light and Love’, one of the few genuine vocal duets in Schubert) have them singing together. The baritone adapts strict metre to words and their sense, and phrases with verbal freedom (listen to the desolation conveyed in ‘The Wanderer’ or the way he evokes a serene mood in ‘Winter Evening’). His presentation is unaffected, with sure legato and vivid expression. Rowan Pierce doesn’t quite match the baritone’s verbal acuity and capacity to colour the words but her fresh timbre, sensitivity and technical security offer their own rewards (her limpid soprano carries smoothly up to the high B flat in ‘Suleika II’). Both singers’ work is admirably complemented by Christopher Glynn’s tasteful and musicianly support at the piano, whether in the whirling accompaniment of ‘The Child of the Muses’, the sharp characterisation of the brief accompanied recitative at the beginning of ‘Nocturne’ or the relentless driving octaves in ‘On the Bridge at the Brook’.