Jon Vickers’s 1983 Winterreise is simply hors concours. As with everything he sang, the Canadian tenor’s sincerity and depth of feeling are never in doubt. Those sympathetic to his idiosyncratic, histrionic way with Schubert’s cycle will hear something of the appalling intensity of his Grimes, Florestan, Otello and Tristan. From the funereal trudge of ‘Gute Nacht’, Vickers’s wanderer is tormented, death-haunted, unstable in every sense. Many songs – say, ‘Wasserflut’, ‘Rast’, ‘Einsamkeit’ – exude a strange, trance-like calm, sung in a half-voice that verges on a croon. In the frenzied outbursts of rage or despair we glimpse the power of a Titanic voice that was then well past its meridian (almost all the songs are transposed down from their original keys).

Wayward is a laughably inadequate word to describe Vickers’s attitude to rhythm. In virtually every song the tempo proposed by the faithful Geoffrey Parsons is merely a basis for negotiation. Thwarting the pianist’s every attempt to create that crucial Schubertian gehende Bewegung or forward motion, Vickers distends and chops up phrases at will. The results will sound illuminating or indulgent, even grotesque, according to taste. Has any singer, I wonder, ever drawn out the climactic ‘Wein’ in ‘Letzte Hoffnung’ to such masochistic lengths? Diehard Vickers aficionados who failed to acquire this recording on its initial release will need no prompting, of course – and the ‘bonus’ CD offers interesting reflections on the tenor’s operatic career.

As you’ll have guessed, after repeated hearings my own reactions to this Winterreise have veered between mesmerised fascination and faint revulsion. But I wouldn’t have missed it.