This is an intermittently touching journey across Schubert’s snowbound landscape, but not one that left me moved, let alone chilled or disturbed. Partnered by Jos van Immerseel’s attractively “woody” fortepiano (a modern copy of an early- 19th-century Walter instrument), Thomas Bauer is a thoughtful, personable singer who uses his words expressively. At forte his baritone has an incisive bite: say, in the horrified final climax of “Die Krähe” (where Bauer and van Immerseel vindicate an uncommonly agitated tempo), or the desperate bravado of “Mut”. But when he sings softly – which in Winterreise means most of the time – his tone becomes slightly fuzzy and tremulous. Too often the pitch sags. Bauer’s default mode is anxious, rueful melancholy, sympathetic up to a point but tending towards the lachrymose when his piano and pianissimo singing lacks a firm centre. He affectingly realises the bleak weariness of “Rast”, and addresses the sleeping villagers of “Im Dorfe” with confiding tenderness. But I was unconvinced by his breathy, whispered half-voice to suggest exhaustion and/or encroaching derangement in “Das Wirtshaus” and “Die Nebensonnen”.

On a recent rival Winterreise with fortepiano, Peter Harvey sings more scrupulously, with truer focus to his tone and greater care for legato. He is also more alive to shifts of harmonic colour and perspective, as in the nostalgic major-key central verse of “Rückblick”, poignantly experienced by Harvey where Bauer barely varies his tone. Gary Cooper, too, plays with more imagination and a sharper eye for detail than the reliable but sometimes prosaic (in rhythm and timing) van Immerseel, though in fairness he is hardly flattered by an overly resonant acoustic.