James Gilchrist’s Wanderer has been around a bit. Not enough to make him weary or wary, far from it – a first-kindled enthusiasm only burns itself out a little in the fourth song, “Danksagung an den Bach” – but in place of the youthful impetuosity of Werner Güra is the anxiety of a man to seize what he can while he can. His jealousy – “Eifersucht und Stolz” – gains thereby a specially manic edge, and leaves him almost shouting at the end of “Die Böse Farbe” before he takes his leave of love and life in both sorrow and anger over the ever-more-painful course of the last triptych.

If that brief account, and the timings, often very quick or slow, suggest exaggeration or melodrama, then they mislead, for I was never aware of a word being presented for my particular attention (never mind Bostridge and Johnson, think of the beloved’s “laaangem Halse” craning after the hunter and away from Güra’s Wanderer), and in some songs Gilchrist can barely get the words out in time, but line and sense never falter.

How aptly Anna Tilbrook’s pedalling poses the question to the brook at the beginning of “Die Neugierige”, and how graciously Gilchrist waits until the last verse before slowing down to ask himself. That his mix of chest and head registers tends more towards the latter than is usual may disconcert some, but it allows for the most intimate and touching of quarter-voices at the end of his confession to the flowers, “Des Müllers Blumen”, and brings uneasy rest indeed to the final lullaby: next to him, Christoph Prégardien sounds quite formal, almost disengaged. He and Güra and their pianists have made among the very finest of modern versions; and so, now, have Gilchrist and Tilbrook.