Just a few months after a fourth volume of ‘Schubert in English’ (12/23), Christopher Glynn’s initiative of recording lieder in English translation moves on to a first volume of Schumann. Covering three of the composer’s best-loved cycles, this new album raises the same old questions, the answers for which are likely to vary from one listener to another.

My sense, however, is that the nature of the poetry Schumann chose here, and the highly sensitive way in which he set it, will make these performances more contentious than those on the Schubert collections. Jeremy Sams’s translations score highly on easy flow and clarity, certainly, and compromise between fidelity and viability is of course the name of the game.

But does he go too far? We lose an alarming amount of the original poetry’s imagery – gone is the snake in ‘I don’t complain’ (‘Ich grolle nicht’), for example, and in the ‘The vast and vaulted cathedral’ before it there’s no mention of the Rhine or Cologne.

Elsewhere, the tone can feel misjudged, with the cloying ‘My pretty little teddy bear / With sleepity eyes and towsely hair’ for ‘Du lieber, lieber Engel du / Du schauest mich an und lächelst dazu’ in the penultimate song of Frauenliebe und -Leben, for example. More so than with previous volumes I found myself wondering, when the new text deviates so much from the old, how much, in a meaningful sense, of the song is left.

Nevertheless, the three singers are certainly expert in conveying the new words – although one occasionally notices with Ailish Tynan and Kathryn Rudge how difficult English can be to get across naturally. They all sing intelligently and with evident commitment: the soprano is bright and direct; the mezzo a little tremulous, perhaps, but movingly heartfelt; Roderick Williams is characteristically fine.

Christophe Glynn’s playing is never anything less than sensitive and beautifully turned, and the engineering is excellent. Followers of the series needn’t hesitate. For those curious to sample it, though, I’d recommend Nicky Spence’s The Fair Maid of the Mill as a more convincing starting point (7/22).