‘An exceptionally fine singer’, noted the much-missed John Steane in his review of Thomas Oliemans’s Schwanengesang (Etcetera, 3/11), while being intermittently perturbed by ‘a layer of hardness, impurity’ above mezzo-forte. In this new Dichterliebe the Dutch baritone is sensitive and specific in his responses, and can distil a rapt tenderness when singing softly. Yet, even more than Steane, I’m troubled by the hardness – ‘grittiness’ was my own immediate reaction – when he puts any pressure on his tone. The harsh, even strained climax of the penultimate ‘Aus alten Märchen’ is a case in point. Oliemans has obviously pondered deeply Schumann’s cycle of awakened love and disillusion, and offers many moments of illumination, not least his musing inwardness, with a gentle pointing of ‘der Liebsten genau’ at the close of ‘Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome’.

Like Gerald Finley on his Gramophone Award-winning recording (Hyperion, 11/08), Oliemans sings the cycle in the past tense, emphasising nostalgia and resignation. But his chosen tempi tend to be even slower, provocatively so in the opening ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’, sung as if through a gauze of tears, and ‘Hör ich ein Liedchen klingen’. This latter song should surely have an insidiously disturbing undertow, rising to near-violence in the piano postlude. Here the mood remains one of wistful melancholy.

Like Oliemans, pianist Paolo Giacometti can short-change the cycle’s scorn and ironic bitterness. But he draws some delicious sonorities from his Conrad Graf fortepiano of c1830, as in the hazy fronds of arpeggios that envelop the voice in ‘Ich will meine Seele tauchen’. For the Op 89 and Op 90 songs, from Schumann’s creative autumn, Giacometti moves to an overtone-rich Streicher fortepiano whose resonance can further blur Schumann’s dense chromatic textures in such songs as ‘Es stürmt am Abendhimmel’, from the rarely heard Op 89 set, and ‘Einsamkeit’. Provisos about Oliemans’s grittiness at mf and above remain. But in the main he is a sympathetic, often moving advocate of these fragile songs of transience and disenchantment, whether in the plaintive ‘Heimliches Verschwinden’, the wistful – and very Chopinesque – ‘Röselein, Röselein’ (the fortepiano’s bell-like treble enchantingly heard here), or the justly popular ‘Meine Rose’, truly innig, as Schumann requests.