This is a disc I rather wish I weren’t reviewing. There’s a fine line between artlessness and blandness in Schubert, and one that Nienke Oostenrijk fails to locate. Time and again I was struck by the gulf between what the Dutch soprano writes in her perceptive booklet-notes (acknowledging a debt to Fischer-Dieskau, Graham Johnson et al) and what I hear. Her shallow, girlish timbre might be effective in early music, though I don’t care for her habit of starting longer notes ‘straight’ and then applying vibrato fulsomely. The opening ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ sets the tone. While any singer must convey a measure of innocence and vulnerability, Oostenrijk’s extreme of naivety seems simply inadequate. With minimal variety of colour and dynamics, even at the searing final climax, she never remotely suggests Gretchen’s confused passion and newly awakened sexuality.

Elsewhere the emotional range veers between mild elation and wan melancholy. As in ‘Gretchen’, Oostenrijk crucially lacks the reserves of passion and power for the first ‘Suleika’ song (whose euphoric sustained crescendo goes for nothing) and what should be the immense spiritual struggle of ‘Die junge Nonne’. Ellen’s three songs from Scott’s The Lady of the Lake ripple by guilelessly and unmemorably from both singer and her rhythmically unimaginative pianist. The laments of Kolma and Iphigenia both imply deeper, grander voices than Oostenrijk’s; and the best one can say of the excitable love song ‘Delphine’ is that there’s no danger of it suggesting ‘an Amazonian onslaught’ (Graham Johnson’s phrase), as it can do when heavier sopranos tackle it. As to the extended ‘floral ballad’ ‘Viola’, a piece that needs the most sensitive handling if it is not to sound coyly monotonous, Oostenrijk’s written observations are far more interesting than her colourless singing. Which rather sums it up.