“A very charming fairy-tale idyll” was Schumann’s description of The Pilgrimage of the Rose, composed in 1851 for domestic performance by his Düsseldorf “singing circle”. His literary taste certainly grew more erratic in later years and lawyer-turned-poet Moritz Horn’s coy tale of a rose who becomes human to experience the joys of love and motherhood is German Romanticism at its most sickly sweet. What evidently attracted Schumann was the poem’s mix of Teutonic rusticity and moral idealism, and the opportunity for picturesque choral scenes – gossamer fairies’ choruses à la A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a funeral lament, a lusty hunt and a boozy wedding party complete with rustic bagpipe effects. If folksy naivety and cosy Gemütlichkeit rule, there are many echt Schumannesque touches of poetry: say, in the love duet between the Rose and Max the forester, or the tenor narrator’s tender valediction (in flexible arioso-recitative, different in style from anything else in the work) before the Rose’s final transfiguration.

While Schumann felt that the original version with piano was better suited to the “delicate subject matter”, his cantata undeniably gains in colour and atmosphere from his subsequent orchestration, as heard on the recordings by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (EMI, 12/83R) and Gustav Kuhn (Chandos, 7/95). Still, if you want Schumann’s folk fairy-tale presented as an intimate Liederspiel – a play-in-song – Gerhard Jenemann and his forces catch the work’s spirit with charm and skill. As the narrator, Christoph Prégardien (whose son Julian makes his mark in the small part of Max) finely balances simplicity and a Lieder singer’s subtlety of inflection. Anna Lucia Richter exudes virginal innocence as the Rose, and the other solos are decently taken by members of the tightly knit chorus. Michael Gees, playing on what sounds like an overtone-rich late-19th-century piano, is always alive to character and atmosphere. The recording of the voices is closer than I find ideal, to the detriment of really soft singing. The sole direct rival is a slightly more polished, operatically sophisticated performance directed by Marcus Creed (Harmonia Mundi, 7/99). Enjoyable as that is, this new recording is arguably truer to Schumann at his most bucolically ingenuous.