Recital audiences are often confronted with singers performing texts originally written for different genders and voice types, so this recording is not without precedent. Still, hearing a countertenor sing anything written between the years of 1700 and 1900 – to say nothing of voice type transcending gender – takes a moment of aural recalibration.

Scholl brings the same commitment to the Classical and Romantic repertory as he does to Purcell and Dowland. His priorities, as he states on the packaging, are ‘simplicity and sincerity,’ which describes not merely these individual performances but also the structure of the programme. Transitions from Brahms to Haydn, or Mozart to Schubert, are not as sudden as they might seem. Classicists are captured at their most romantic, romantics at their most classical. The core of each selection is a commitment to the German folksong tradition that neither Scholl nor pianist Tamar Halperin forsakes.

As a recitalist, Scholl is less a story-teller than a weaver of spells, unleashing a fully conceived emotional state and sustaining it. The measure of his success is that he makes Brahms’s brooding folksongs and Mozart’s charming Das Veilchen seem complete unto themselves, yet wholly interrelated.

My one complaint is that the recording level so clearly favours the voice. Particularly with the romantics, I kept longing to hear a bit more piano. Fortunately, in periodic non-vocal interludes, Halperin has the microphone all to herself.