The freshness of youth is an essential asset in Schubert’s mill cycle. Andrè Schuen’s handsome, ductile baritone has it in spades. Veering between impulsive ardour and dreamy introspection, the opening songs never remotely hint that the journeyman miller is unstable, let alone a potential suicide. In his healthy vigour – a touch of macho bravado, too, in ‘Am Feierabend’ – Schuen is closer to Thomas Quasthoff than to the neurotically questioning Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau or the disturbed Matthias Goerne. Buoyed by the limpid playing of Daniel Heide, a model pianist partner throughout, ‘Ungeduld’ is ideally airborne, the words clearly, naturally enunciated in a song that can too easily become a frantic tongue-twister. And while other baritones, including Quasthoff and Wolfgang Holzmair, have brought more grace to the stylised yodelling of ‘Mein’, Schuen’s excited exultation is hard to resist.

Doubts begin to creep in with the three central strophic songs, ‘Morgengruss’, ‘Des Müllers Blumen’ and ‘Tränenregen’. Deploying a velvet mezza voce, Schuen sings these with a musing tenderness yet minimal variety between verses. There is no suggestion of barely suppressed impatience, for instance, in ‘Morgengruss’, and no attempt to characterise the girl’s banal ‘It’s raining, I’m off home’ – the only words she speaks – at the end of ‘Tränenregen’.

Schuen’s miller remains in robust vocal health after the glamorous huntsman shatters his illusions. I hear little bitterness at the start of ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’, no heartbreak beneath the nonchalant veneer of the song’s final verse. Then, in an unnerving contrast, the final group of songs take mournful reverie to extremes, broken only by the muscular defiance of ‘Die böse Farbe’. Schuen’s tempos for ‘Die liebe Farbe’ and the last three songs match Goerne’s for slowness – some achievement. With no hint of a gentle valse triste lilt, ‘Der Müller und der Bach’ suggests a passive drift to oblivion; and the benedictory ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ unfolds in four trance-like beats to the bar, in defiance of Schubert’s prescribed two beats and tempo direction Mässig (moderato). Where most performances of this song clock in at around six minutes, Schuen takes nine: similar to Goerne but without his haunted intensity. Daniel Heide does all he can to animate and vary the piano textures between the five verses. But I found the experience enervating, even more on repeated hearings.

Others will react differently, of course. Schuen has a superb, free-ranging voice, used with taste and invariable sensitivity to the text. His unforced exuberance in the opening songs could hardly be bettered. Yet those indulgently distended tempos in the final sequence, especially, continue to jar. All four singers listed below move me more deeply in Schubert’s cycle of curdled innocence, with Quasthoff and Fischer-Dieskau, 1961 vintage, the most moving of all.