The close creative partnership between Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis is immediately heard in the opening “Liebesbotschaft”, Schubert’s last, and perhaps most magical, evocation of a rippling brook. Padmore’s silvery, keen-edged tenor, grace of phrase and sensitivity to mood and verbal nuance are ideal here; and how affectionately Lewis’s left hand sings in gentle colloquy with the voice. Like “Abschied” – all debonair nonchalance until the wistful longing in the final verse – “Liebesbotschaft” gains crucially in brightness and transparency in Schubert’s original, high, key.

Perhaps “Ständchen”, for all its limpid beauty, is just too melancholically resigned, more elegy than serenade. But Padmore and Lewis rise magnificently to the challenge of the darker Rellstab songs and the visionary Heine settings, with their oscillations between eerie calm and engulfing Weltschmerz: in the hushed, fearful opening of “Kriegers Ahnung” and the panic that underlies the dulcet music at “Bald ruh ich wohl”; the intense, aching legato, sustained through the slowest possible tempo, of “Am Meer”; or the gradations of horror and desolation in “Der Doppelgänger”. Lewis’s fff chord before the voice’s final, anguished “so manche Nacht” has a shocking fullness and force I have never heard matched.

Like “Ständchen”, “Die Taubenpost” is unusually slow and rueful, a dream of love irrevocably lost. On my favourite rival tenor recording of Schwanengesang, Peter Schreier and András Schiff (Decca, 6/90 – nla) have a jaunty charm, touched by wistfulness, which seems just right. But Padmore’s lighter voice, with its suggestion of youthful candour and vulnerability, is arguably the more ingratiating. In its fine balance of subtlety and devastating emotional directness, this is certainly a Schwanengesang in the Schreier-Schiff class, its attractions enhanced by the “bonus” items: “Auf dem Strom”, a tribute to Beethoven, graced here by Richard Watkins’s superlative horn-playing, and a delectable, dancing “Die Sterne”.