With so much awareness afoot over repressive patriarchal cultures past and present, how can – and does – anyone record Frauenliebe und -leben? Schumann’s masterly combination of lyrical impulse and psychological characterisation can make you forget – but only for so long – just how much this male-authored poetry is the apotheosis of unquestioning husband-worship and affirmation of the traditional submissive female role.

The programme here – recorded in 2018, ahead of the current zeitgeist – doesn’t deconstruct the Frauenliebe marriage-to-widowhood narrative but augments each individual song with other songs by both Robert and Clara Schumann that give a broader social context, based not just on what the poems say but how the music projects the words. Obviously, the cycle’s sequence and flow is interrupted, though the side-by-side juxtaposition of the Frauenliebe songs with other music makes points that probably aren’t possible outside a lecture recital, though unlike lecture recitals, what one takes from this programme will likely evolve with each hearing. Early on in the album, Clara’s treatment of the Rückert poem ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ feels poignantly reticent – in contrast to Mahler’s later, bolder setting – with a simpler Biedermeier sensibility also suggesting a composer who didn’t feel as entitled as her male counterparts to truly plant her flag on the poem. Other contrasting moments between Clara and Robert clarify Clara’s compositional personality apart from her husband’s: she was more strongly rooted in Mendelssohn.

The sequencing is often effective, but not always. Some of the best song juxtapositions contrast the Frauenliebe faith in marriage with more complicated doubt expressed in the two ‘Lieder der Braut’ from Robert’s Myrthen cycle, dealing with the mother’s empty nest but also the reality that not all marriages last. And at the cycle’s end, there’s Robert’s own ‘Requiem’, a song from the 1850 Op 90 cycle that could be the composer’s own benediction with the words ‘Rest from pain-racked toil and love’s burning glow’.

Ultimately, the album becomes a reaffirmation of Frauenliebe, despite its retro minuses: the added songs both by Robert and Clara reveal, in contrast, how each chapter in the song-cycle projects a more dimensional personality behind the verse in ways not often found in this or any other composer’s song-cycle output.

Amid formidable recorded competition, Sampson is close to the top of the Frauenliebe pantheon – at least among recordings that, like Anne Sofie von Otter (DG, 11/95), treat the piece like a highly visceral monodrama. Typical bridal age in the 1850s was rather younger than now, which Sampson suggests with a contained version of her usual timbre in the opening song. Tempos are flexibly contoured to the words so sympathetically in ‘Du Ring an meinem Finger’ that vocal line and piano seem to be floating together. More daring decisions include ‘Süsser Freund, du blickest mich verwundert an’ at such a slow tempo and with such eloquent rhetorical pauses that it clocks in at 4'27", in comparison to 3'07" with Dorothea Röschmann and Mitsuko Uchida (Decca, 12/15). Surprisingly, it works – entrancingly. That and other solo piano interludes are so imaginatively played that it’s high time Joseph Middleton made an album of solo Schumann piano music.