By now, Ian Bostridge’s followers have approximate expectations of any new recording, this one being Schumann songs written mostly in the composer’s great song-writing year of 1840: crisp enunciation, incisive attacks, highly specific insights and a voice that, at the age of 60, seems to do 90 per cent of what his intelligence demands are nothing unusual. The surprise, in his reading of Schumann’s beloved Liederkreis, Op 39, is how much his approach diverges from his Schubert, in which text projection is paramount at every turn. Schumann made changes in the verses in order to create a great song, and in that spirit, Bostridge at times overrides the specific meaning of the text, most obviously in the famous ‘Mondnacht’, enjoying Schumann’s lyrical exaltation to the fullest. Literary meaning isn’t ignored; he just knows when the music carries the moment with his expansive upper range and a depth of tone in his lower range.

Among tenor-voice recordings of the Eichendorff Liederkreis, Bostridge temperamentally falls in the middle of the boyish, fresh-voiced Werner Güra (my personal favourite), who anxiously enters the ‘foreign land’ of the opening song ‘In der Fremde’ as if for the first time, and Peter Schreier (in his memorable András Schiff collaboration), who projects more world-weary ambivalence. Bostridge’s storytelling sensibility is particularly evident in ‘Waldesgespräch’, in which the witchy voice of the Lorelei is initially muted but becomes monstrous – suggesting that the demon is growing inside the protagonist’s head.

Other Schumann songs here document how the year of 1840 wasn’t ceaselessly brilliant, though the infrequently heard Kerner Lieder is represented by a performance that makes sense of the cycle as a cohesive unit in ways that I’ve never previously heard. Musically uneven, the Kerner Lieder often feels like a badly mismatched collection of styles including Carl Loewe, though pianist Saskia Giorgini actually uses the weak endings to fuse the songs like the fragmentary components of Dichterliebe. Bostridge convincingly brings the emotional concentration of Winterreise into the mix.

The challenging six-minute-plus ‘Stirb, Lieb’ und Freud’’ unfolds at a perfect tempo, almost like a bedtime story, never dragging, but ending with a daringly elongated soul-baring treatment of the coda. Even more affecting is Giorgini’s treatment of the solo piano ritornellos that take ‘Stille Liebe’ into a beyond-text realm of expression. ‘Stille Tränen’ shows Schumann at his rhapsodic best, and if Bostridge has been guilty of emotional reserve in the past, he certainly isn’t here. The programme’s emotional arc is completed by ‘Des Sennen Abschied’ from Lieder-Album für die Jugend, whose valedictory quality is remarked upon in Bostridge’s booklet notes. The symbolic finality of the line ‘Summer is over’ hopefully doesn’t mark the end of the Bostridge/Giorgini exploration of Schumann. In Bostridge’s vast discography, this is one of his best.