EMl hit an inspired note when it invited Andsnes and Bostridge to complement the fomer’s series of Schubert’s greatest sonatas with an aptly chosen selection of songs. For here, surely, are musical soul-mates, two artists who fuse to become one and whose love of Schubert’s variety and ambivalence is evident in every bar. In Der liebliche Stern their range of nuance never excludes naturalness and what concentrated musical energy they discover in Auf der Bruck. Each twist and turn of the narrative in Fülle der Liebe is deftly caught and both artists find a cool, attenuated, almost Gallic beauty in Der Wanderer with its final line ‘froh ungeben, doch alleine’ (‘there is joy all around, yet I am alone’). Again, in the concluding Der Schmetterling you could hardly hope for a lighter touch or a greater sense of enchantment and it is only in the sonata that a few doubts arise.

Again it is Andsnes’s naturalness that impresses most. The opening Allegro with its pounding martial rhythms is brilliant but never hard-pressed. The continuity is sweeping and imperious and there is no question of unheavenly length in the second movement Con moto. Everything is kept refreshingly on the move and if there is an occasional impression of more sense than sensibility the playing is never less than musicianly. The hushed coda is notable although Andsnes never pleads his case too strongly his coolness and control hardly make you forget long-cherished recordings by Schnabel, Kempff, Curzon, Brendel and, perhaps most of all, Gilels. Gilels’s loving tenderness in the Con moto makes him clock in at 16'26" as opposed to Andsnes’s 12'26", a remarkable difference. Some will claim Andsnes has Schubert on his side and find his momentum a bracing alternative to sentimentality. But both here and in the concluding Scherzo and Rondo his performance could hardly be called richly inclusive. Why so unsmiling in the Scherzo’s lilting second subject and central Trio, and how I missed just a touch of Kempff’s magical insouciance at the start of the Rondo. Simplicity and a certain open-endedness are at the heart of this wonderfully gifted young pianist’s reading, but although musical to the last he makes you realise that there are higher goods than candour and lucidity. For all his youthful energy and transparency there is too little inner illumination. For that you must return to Andsnes’s partnership with Bostridge where both artists clearly inspire each other. The recorded sound is excellent, the presentation lavishly illustrated and the translations of the songs are by Richard Wigmore.