The question here is not how these two new recordings of Schumann’s often heard and increasingly discussed song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben hold up to what’s already out there. Both have distinctive programmatic concepts – presumably devised independently of each other – that juxtapose Robert and Clara Schumann with pieces by the British composer Sally Beamish (b1956), and for very different reasons.

Sandra Porter’s album is yet another programmatic exploration into the lives of the Schumanns, with Beamish’s 23-minute Clara, a 1995 musical setting of Janice Galloway’s diary-like text that, like Frauenliebe, encompasses a life cycle, with keen details that make the well-known historic events feel real, from Clara’s child-prodigy success to the pernicious madness that overtook husband Robert.

Vocal lines are wide-ranging, from straightforward quasi-recitatives to more expressionistic vocalisation with just as important tonally ambiguous piano-writing, unified by an opening series of tightly constructed chords that cast a wide net of expressive possibilities. Anguished flights of coloratura as well as declamatory vocal lines give the piece the visceral power of a spoken monologue, accompanied by busy atonal passagework in the piano. Voice and piano become spare and limited in range after Robert’s attempted suicide, conveying how the bottom dropped out of Clara’s world.

As good as this early ish piece is, I would love Beamish to revise it with more of the dramaturgical precision heard in Four Songs from Hafez, the 2007 cycle on Roderick Williams’s ‘Birdsong’ disc. The tonality/atonality spectrum isn’t a one-or-the-other choice for Beamish but a well-used resource, such as in the poetic tone clusters in ‘Hoopoe’. Vocal lines with Middle Eastern inflections remind you that the 14th-century poet Hafez was Persian. Beamish’s portrayals of the natural world go beyond musical description: her nightingale imagery is full of nervous, repeated notes in the piano, suggesting neurotic obsession. Such unexpected portals of meaning are rewards upon repeated visits.

The performers give their absolute best for their respective Beamish outings, with pianist Graeme McNaught getting extra points for encompassing the sprawling demands of Clara. Porter, though, may have been a bit vocally tired by the time she got around to Frauenliebe. Her vibrato isn’t as controlled as elsewhere on the album, occasionally getting in the way of some impassioned moments in her portrait of a woman with limited life experience but no lack of intense emotional depths. Her medium-weight soprano conveys a moving Mendelssohnian poise in the Clara Schumann songs, especially in ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’, also on the Williams disc.

Is Williams the first baritone to record Frauenliebe? Though female singers (Lotte Lehmann especially) crossed the gender line in Schubert and Schumann song-cycles, Williams bravely goes in the opposite direction. His success depends on your overall admiration level for him. Mine is quite high, so I’m delighted with the recording, especially with Andrew West’s crisp pianism. I don’t sense that Williams has lived with the piece as long as he has his core repertoire but his animated projection of the text and the unselfconscious exuberance more than justify this addition to the Schumann song discography.

More notable are the Brahms selections that punctuate the disc. Williams seems to be on a new level with his command of the German texts and complete cognitive grasp of what he is singing. He is also a published composer, and one hears evidence of that in the way he finds an emotional charge in elements that other singers regard as Brahms’s purely technical devices. Comparisons with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s masterly Brahms lieder with Daniel Barenboim (DG) might seem cruel but they’re flattering to Williams, whose extrovert projection of Romantic-era poetry is such that there’s no chance of anachronistic observation in some of the more dated texts. Williams sings it all with equal conviction, sometimes to a degree that Fischer-Dieskau does not.