Schubert once reportedly remarked to a friend: ‘Do you know any cheerful music? I don’t.’ If he did utter these words, this latter-day Schubertiade vigorously refutes them. Comic Schubert may seem an oxymoron. But there is plenty of fun in the risqué solo song ‘Die Unterscheidung’ and the trio ‘Der Hochzeitsbraten’, an unstaged operatic scena that trades on half-echoes of Figaro. Leavening this unbridled merriment are pantheistic hymns (‘Gott im Ungewitter’, with its bouts of Handelian fugato, and the grandly imposing ‘Die Allmacht’), the touching ‘Begräbnislied’, and the cantata ‘Gebet’, by turns majestic and lyrically intimate, that Schubert rustled up in a single day for a musical soirée at the Esterházy country estate.

Solemn, saucy or blithe, this is essentially convivial music, to be enjoyed in company, with a glass at hand. From the infectious swing of the opening ‘Der Tanz’, Christoph Berner and his regular vocal team are well-nigh ideal advocates. The four singers muster an impressive body of tone in, say, the Haydnesque ‘Hymne an die Unendlichen’ and the thunderous sections of ‘Gott im Ungewitter’, and produce a beautifully controlled ppp at the magical close of ‘Gebet’. In ‘Der Hochzeitsbraten’ the vocal acting is aptly over-the-top, not least at the end, where Marlis Petersen has Konrad Jarnot’s pompous gamekeeper (a rustic Count Almaviva) salivating lubriciously at the prospect of sexual conquest.

The solo songs come off equally well. Unfazed by the high tessitura, Petersen is all flustered innocence in ‘Delphine’, while mezzo Anke Vondung is smiling and erotically knowing in ‘Die Unterscheidung’, with the piano adding volleys of back-of-the-hand laughter. In the early, rather Mozartian ballad ‘Der Sänger’, Werner Güra is vivid in declamation and sings the lyrical arioso sections with sweet tone, if not immaculate legato. Jarnot brings both dramatic power and tenderness to ‘Die Allmacht’. Playing a 19th-century Rönisch fortepiano, with its bell-like treble and clear, percussive bass, Christoph Berner excels throughout as accompanist, pianistic commentator and animator.