Now at the peak of his recording career, Gerald Finley is unsystematically jumping from Ives to Ravel to Schumann, no doubt because he can, though always at a high standard and answering only to his own vocal perimeters. This new recording shows a greater richness in Finley’s voice plus an evolving intimacy in his approach to recording Lieder, one that retreats from the word-by-word vocal painting of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

From the opening moments of the Op 39 Liederkreis, Finley establishes a general tone for any given phrase or stanza, relying on the power of the sung word to carry the details. When a song has a multiplicity of voices, Finley differentiates them with his tone, but not greatly, since his focus is poetic meaning rather than dramatic narrative. A few songs come out in a single emotional crescendo that knits together the verse’s sprawling imagery. As generalised as his approach might seem, it’s not. Each song’s overall conception – of which Julius Drake is a key part – reflects great thought as to its core emotion. Key consonants are more strongly articulated than others and vowels are elongated for expressive emphasis, but only here and there.

Though the Op 39 Liederkreis has no central protagonist like Frauenliebe und -Leben, Finley makes the cycle a journey into deception, his choice of vocal colour tapping into the manifestations of evil that lie beneath attractive surfaces, most obviously with the enchantress Lorelei in ‘Waldesgespräch’, the danger behind the dusk in ‘Zwielicht’ and the terror behind public merriment in ‘Im Walde’. Of course, that concept is significantly interrupted by the ecstatic ‘Mondnacht’. Still, Finley’s approach overall is more deeply insinuating than many.

The rest of the disc is just as beautifully sung – but why record an incredibly minor work such as the Op 36 Reinick cycle? And though Finley’s Op 24 is as articulate and as well sung as any, his soft-grained approach offers no counterbalance to the composer’s subdued respect for the power of the poem. Might Finley be more systematic than he now seems – and is he planning to record Schumann comprehensively?