Schubert is once reported to have exclaimed to a friend, ‘Do you know any cheerful music? I don’t.’ His alleged words might stand as an epigraph to this latest volume of Matthias Goerne’s Schubert Edition. With his velvety, ‘covered’ timbre and innate seriousness of manner, Goerne has never been a natural bringer of jollity. When the Schubertian spirit lightens, he can be animated, ardent, but hardly exultant. ‘Der Musensohn’ has abundant energy and character but never quite soars – though admittedly the slightly boomy acoustic (more apparent on this second disc) compromises the buoyancy of Eric Schneider’s accompaniment. Nor do
I hear any playfulness or sensuality in ‘Versunken’, perhaps Schubert’s most overtly erotic outpouring.

Yet if we accept that lightness and charm are not within Goerne’s orbit, his singing is always scrupulous (his legato, as ever, a model for any aspiring Lieder singer) and his interpretations profoundly considered. His performances of several familiar songs are as fine as any I know, not least ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’, the girl’s pleading anxious rather than fevered, Death’s response both implacable and compassionate – and how beautifully the ever-perceptive Helmut Deutsch weights and ‘voices’ the chords of the keyboard prelude. The twilit mystery and grotesquerie of ‘Der Zwerg’ are as powerfully characterised as by Fischer-Dieskau (with Moore, DG), without his great predecessor’s distortions of tone for dramatic effect.

In ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’, more melancholy in feeling than usual, Goerne caresses Schubert’s graceful lines with yearning tenderness (not once on these discs will you hear a melody distorted by bumps, bulges or unscripted accents). He digs deep into his bass resonances for a thrillingly energised performance of ‘An Schwager Kronos’, while ‘An den Mond’ and the second ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ are unsurpassed in their unearthly inwardness.

If Goerne usually vindicates his penchant for broad tempi, the entrancing immobility of ‘Litanei’ had me open-mouthed. Granted, the evenness and breath control are masterly. But for me the grave simplicity of Schubert’s lovely melody is indulgently, absurdly, inflated. To end on this negative note, though, would traduce singer and pianists. Not the least of pleasures here is the depths the baritone finds in relatively little-known songs such as the noble sunset evocation ‘An die untergehende Sonne’ and three Klopstock settings of Mozartian grace and tenderness. At his finest, here and elsewhere, Goerne touches greatness as a Schubertian.