Wise men have told us that Strauss loved sopranos and looked down on tenors – but here comes a second recital by that particular male voice in recent times seriously to challenge that belief. Hyperion is an old hand at programming attractively playable discs that make up complete Lied editions. Seven of Andrew Kennedy’s new set place him in direct competition with the Gramophone Award-winning and weightier tenor of Jonas Kaufmann (Harmonia Mundi). A comparison of national approaches is irresistible: the British performers slower, more serious and concert-oriented (although no less word-conscious), the Germans swifter, more operatic and dangerous. Both singers manage the often tricky tessitura with comfortable skill.

Kennedy’s selection has the earlier material, with the Opp 17 and 32 groups given complete. Strauss’s choice of poets at this stage (like von Schack in Opp 17 and 19) in his Lied career may not have been as sophisticated as it became but he never chose a text that didn’t inspire a clear musical portrait. Especially well pointed are two Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs (“Himmelsboten” and the droll love-on-the-cheap story of “Für fünfzehn Pfennige”) and the dark, serious “Sehnsucht”. The better-known “Ständchen”and what Roger Vignoles’s notes call the “ebullient barnstormer” “Heimliche Aufforderung” are placed cunningly within the recital order.

Vignoles’s playing continues to achieve a maximum of freshness and invention and a chameleon-like closeness to his singer’s tone and line. Kennedy’s voice is young, sweet, fluent and has what some commentators call “sap”. Greater naturalness (and especially inwardness) will come in his live and later performances of this repertoire. In the meantime, a lot of work and study has gone into this disc and the readings attain a consistently high standard of beautiful music-making.