BIS’s extraordinary notes quote major Grieg authorities determined to damn many of these songs with not even faint praise. The Reminiscences from Mountain and Fjord were written down almost literally en plein air while Grieg hiked his beloved Jotunheim glacier with his collaborator, Danish poet Holger Drachmann, in tow. The meat in this sandwich (portraits of four girls, fictitious we trust, encountered on the road) is slender, but deliberately so, because the Norwegian mood music scoffed at by the experts is surely intentionally parodistic. And the Four Romances, also attacked, are gems of an early Grieg, just shaking off his Germanic training in Leipzig.

The Op 49 Poems (Drachmann texts again) constitute a minor masterpiece, a cycle of the pains of love through the seasons that would enrich any Lieder singer’s repertoire. This is Grieg in his element: like Schubert and Wolf, he simply didn’t need large-scale forms and resources to make resonant emotional statements. It’s also recognisably the Grieg of the darker corners of Peer Gynt where natural melodic richness is frequently undercut by innovative harmonic turns and rhythmic surprises. For this cycle alone – and there’s surprisingly little competition in the catalogue, where other singers have just cherry-picked a song or two – the disc is worth having.

Groop and Vignoles are masters of what they have chosen to survey. Technical fluency may be taken as read – but not ignored, for simple-sounding Grieg, like simple-sounding Mozart, is often anything but. Groop knows precisely how far to take her vocal characterisation of the many forlorn lovers – and the even more numerous dramatic turns in the weather – and does a nice line in male seducers. Vignoles’s bright, direct and alert playing feels totally idiomatic. Sound and balance are ideal; the booklet-notes, and the decision to provide a singing English translation, less so.