These performances were originally recorded for BBC Radio 3’s regular and imaginative series, Voices, and Black Box promises further issues from that source. If they are as good as this one they will be worth waiting for. They sound like very well-prepared performances, for a start: singers and pianist have obviously spent much time thinking about the texts and working out what their voices can do with these songs. Both singers as a result expand to the demands of the music.

I had not thought that Roderick Williams’s fine-grained baritone would be capable of some of the bigger utterances here, but after hearing this disc I am not surprised that he has since gone on to sing Wagner’s Donner. Only in the huge and awkward intervals of ‘Traumleben’ is there any hint of strain, and both baritone and pianist find real power and drama in ‘Der verlorene Haufen’ and in that, as Burnside acknowledges in his booklet note, quite repulsive (but repulsively fascinating) song ‘Warnung’. The splendid, Brahmsian (but then distinctly Wagnerian) ‘Dank’ opens the recital most inspiritingly.

The amount of work that Burnside and Sarah Connolly put into preparing Das Buch der hängenden Gärten is obvious throughout, in subtle phrasing and colouring, intimacy of expression and scrupulous attention to Stefan George’s often obscure and feverish words. A very fine reading, and Burnside is throughout outstandingly imaginative.

All the songs here were recorded in as little as three days, but all three musicians sound as though they had lived with them for months at least. A distinguished and absorbing recital, the recording admirably combining intimacy with space. Burnside’s notes are in a rather jarringly matey, colloquial style that I hope he will modify for future issues; otherwise I have no reservations whatsoever.