With few exceptions, Christian Gerhaher ventures well off the beaten track in this superlative recital centring on the echt Schubertian themes of wandering, evanescence, night and lost or unattainable love. In his classic study of Schubert’s songs (Duckworth: 1928), Richard Capell wrote of the rare ‘An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht’, somewhere between a Lied and an operatic scena, that it ‘would reward an uncommon singer possessing art enough to maintain the interest for all of its length’. I suspect Capell would have given the nod to Gerhaher, in close partnership with the sentient Gerold Huber. With his lyric high baritone at its freest, Gerhaher has the uncommon gift of making everything alive, specific, while always sounding natural. Each shift of perspective in ‘An den Mond in einer Herbstnacht’ – say, the sudden stab of fear at the vulture gnawing the soul, or the lightening of gait and spirit at the memory of boyhood – is vividly caught. Yet the abiding impression, here and throughout this recital, is of spontaneous directness, tempered by a certain restraint.

In the Gothic ballad ‘Der Zwerg’ Gerhaher eschews grotesquerie, making his effects by understatement and the plangency of his perfectly controlled pianissimo singing. The song emerges less as melodrama than as a mysterious human tragedy. ‘Herbst’, that bleak late masterpiece, is likewise elegiac rather than anguished, with Gerhaher cherishing the sculpted beauty of Schubert’s melodic line. He can be charming, too, as in the lazy barcarolle ‘Der Schiffer’ and the pastoral sway of ‘Abendlied an die Entfernte’, where Huber gives a delightful lift to the 6/8 rhythms.

Several of the little-known early songs here look slender on the page. But with his Schubertian gift of mingled simplicity and vitality, Gerhaher makes something cherishable of the limpid, Mozartian ‘Nach einem Gewitter’ and the Baroque-inspired ‘Hoffnung’. In two settings of the troubled Saxon poet Ernst Schulze, ‘Im Walde’ and ‘Über Wildemann’, Gerhaher catches the anguish and desolation without ever compromising beauty of tone and breadth of line. Gerhaher and Huber end their programme with a real rarity, ‘Der Sänger am Felsen’, a strophic song of rather formal, classical cut. But they vindicate their choice with a performance of gentle eloquence and grace. Each successive verse is freshly, naturally, illuminated, with no conscious point-making. It crowns a superlative recital by a singer who for vocal beauty, poetic insight and expressive immediacy is surely unsurpassed in Lieder today.