Following a 2020 Wigmore Hall recital devoted to Schubert and rapturous response to his Schubert song videos uploaded to social media, countertenor Philippe Jaroussky has released an entire album of Schubert standards and a few rarities. It is gorgeous work, a more than equal partnership with his brilliant accompanist, pianist Jérôme Ducros, and an album that leaves one wanting more from this elegant and expressive artist.

The voice is, naturally, light and clear, and the colour range both concentrated and circumscribed. The singer effortlessly transitions from the more exuberant and flamboyant expressivity of Baroque repertoire to the highly distilled and intimate idiom of song. But then, after a fine album of French songs, who would expect anything else?

The drama is in the nuance. ‘Des Fischers Liebesglück’, a long, strophic, narrative song with a sustained ambiguity of mood, builds to a few subtle inflection points on key words ‘Küsse’, ‘weinen’ and ‘lächeln’ as the narrator kisses, weeps and laughs his way to a curiously earthy transcendence. In the ever-so-brief study of love and loss ‘Erster Verlust’, there is a barely perceptible – and thus infinitely meaningful – temporal extension of the last line, adumbrating the most raw and familiar of poetic sentiments, that time eludes us and can never be recaptured.

These quibbles, none of which strikes me as in any way detrimental to the musical impact, might be made: that the voice sometimes lacks a full range of colour, that interpretations are occasionally over-refined and precious, and that a certain fussiness in phrasing breaks up the smoothness of line. Those were first impressions, but vanished on a second and third encounter. In his mid-40s, Jaroussky is already a veteran artist. Yet he sings Schubert as if it is new to him in all the best ways. He will not, as some great Schubert singers occasionally do, allow the music to simply sing itself. The artist is present in the foreground, vividly captivated by the interpretative experience.

Exhausting? Yes, perhaps. But listen to the entrance of the voice on the word ‘Heil’ge’ in ‘Nacht und Träume’, a silvery beam emerging from the dark, soaring above the utterly simple rocking of the piano accompaniment. It’s a haunting moment, and one senses that Jaroussky has heard that note in his head for a very long time. Now we get to hear it, and it’s devastatingly beautiful.