After a Beethoven album with Jan Lisiecki (4/20), baritone Matthias Goerne moves on to work with another of DG’s young star pianists with this new album: a beguiling exploration of longing and resignation in the glow of Romanticism’s long setting of the sun. And Seong-Jin Cho proves himself a superb accompanist, especially adept conjuring up the right atmosphere in Wagner’s spare piano-writing and in the final track, pilfered from Strauss’s Four Last Songs.

Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder might be designated ‘für eine Frauenstimme’ but they pop up more regularly these days sung by men – most recently with piano from the tenors Christoph Prégardien (Challenge Classics, 2/20) and Gerhard Siegel (Hänssler Classic, 5/20), but also in a handsome 2017 recording from the Wagnerian bass Günther Groissböck and pianist Gerold Huber. As one would expect, though, Goerne is somewhat sui generis. Worth noting first is the recorded sound, in which his baritone – its velvet timbre now pleasingly weathered, with big, deep breaths part of the phrasing – is placed in a hazy, resonant foreground, his pianist somewhat recessed.

Immediately we’re in a world of tender sincerity where time can stand still, where poetry and melody meld into one. It’s seductive and hypnotic – listen to the long, thoughtful lines from both singer and pianist at the start of ‘Im Treibhaus’ – with both Georne’s intimate manner and the programming of the album helping us hear Wagner’s songs as moving studies in autumnal introversion.

Goerne offers a similar trick with Strauss’s ‘Im Abendrot’, making one all but forget its original context, Cho’s dainty larks tracing their way beside the long vocal lines. The other Strauss songs are no less entrancing, with the melody of ‘Morgen’ sung out beautifully by the pianist and ‘Ruhe, meine Seele!’ building to achieve an imposing intensity. It’s the central selection of songs by Pfitzner, Strauss’s oft-maligned contemporary, however, that is arguably the highlight of the album, with Goerne proving a superb champion of the composer’s more knotty and tense musical language.

He offers earnest intensity in ‘An die Mark’ and gnarly grandeur in ‘Abendrot’, but can also produce delicacy in the charming ‘Ist der Himmel darum im Lenz so blau’. Cho’s playing is a model of luxurious sensitivity – listen to his voicing of the gentle chords in ‘Nachts’ – further adding to the appeal of these performances in particular and of this handsome, serious album in general.