This collection of strophic ballads has its fair share of the Gothic and Grand Guignol, most of it concerned with death, near-death or yearning for death. It opens with a rare glimpse of Beethovenian humour (“The Song of the Flea”) in a performance from Gerald Finley and Julius Drake that sets the tone and standard for the whole disc.

Finley, who has one of those exquisite voices that could make poetry of the telephone directory, vividly characterises the words without recourse to the exaggerated enunciation to which some of his peers are off-puttingly prone (only once did I wince at an over-egged delivery – “ex-óst-ed”, rather than “ex-áwst-ed”, in Louis Emanuel’s amusingly camp “The Desert”). Drake uses all the colouristic forces he can command with wit (“The Flea”), bravura (“Erlkönig” and Wolf’s spellbinding “Der Feurreiter”) and imagination (Loewe’s “Die wandelnde Glocke”). As these pages have said before, it’s a great partnership.

I do question the musical and literary value of some of the songs presented here. Perhaps audiences were once moved by “Edward” (Loewe/Herder) or entranced by the risible “Die Löwenbraut” (“The Lion’s Bride”) by one Adelbert von Chamisso, a grim tale straight out of Struwwelpeter set to music for some reason by Robert Schumann. Neither strikes me as distinguished in either area, though Finley and Drake make them engaging enough. The only two performances that don’t come off are “The Lost Chord” (too slow for its triumphal peroration to truly register) and Cole Porter’s “The Tale of the Oyster”, which is made to sound like something by Brahms.