This is a magisterial, mesmerising performance, with a touch of genius

definition. It represents an ideal that I searched for everywhere and found in surprisingly few of the 40-odd recordings I heard. To generalise wildly, this is the perfect melding of tone, phrasing, text and subtext. He is alive to every nuance of feeling woven into the deepest levels of Schumann’s setting. Even if you couldn’t hear every word as clearly as this, you’d know what he was singing about just from the way his tone incarnates the emotion. It is often extraordinary to hear how many shades of feeling he can shoot through one phrase: for example, in ‘So werd’ ich ganz und gar gesund’ (‘I will be healthy through and through’) in the song ‘Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’. He also lifts the climax of ‘Ich grolle nicht’ to a magnificent pitch of intensity (I’m afraid I have eliminated those singers who cop out of those top notes towards the end of the song). Irony is there when needed, but never out of balance with pathos and passion. The energy of the penultimate song, ‘Aus alten Märchen’, is magnificent

– a taste of escapist joy that evaporates as magically as it had emerged.

Moore is sometimes a little self-effacing, and the piano seems, in its upper register, to lose its tuning. Nevertheless, his smooth, sensitive playing blends to perfection with Fischer-dieskau’s narrative and offsets it expertly, like sophisticated lighting. And he emerges with modesty yet conviction in the numerous postludes, making the end of the cycle – the return of the music that closed, in regretful forgiveness, ‘Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen’ – a soft catharsis that provides the satisfying final crack of your heart.