This Schöne Müllerin brings Stone Records’ excellent series of the Schubert song-cycles to a conclusion in style. Unlike the previous instalments, though, entrusted to the bass Matthew Rose, here we’re in the hands of a tenor, Robert Murray. He offers a clear-sighted and straightforwardly touching account. His is a light, cleanly produced voice with a narrow bore, which also takes on hints of a heroic steel; the downside is a slight tightness and lack of timbral variation.

It’s a well focused sound, though, and a voice under total technical control. And Murray’s intelligence shines through across the complete cycle, with clever interpretative touches in the strophic songs (listen to the appropriate injection of impatience into the final verse of ‘Ungeduld’) and elsewhere – the telling little push he gives on ‘Klingen’ at the start of ‘Danksagung an den Bach’, for example.

Murray’s German is natural and idiomatic, the words sitting unobtrusively on phrases that are beautifully turned, matched by a control of dynamics that emphasises the sheer melodic beauty of many of the slower numbers: you have to go some way to find more musically satisfying performances of ‘Trockne Blumen’ or ‘Der Müller und der Bach’, even if they and the final song don’t communicate quite as much quiet tragedy as they can do. He’s also little less persuasive in the more forceful and rhetorical songs, where one notices too that Andrew West, for all his sensitivity and musicality, is not as lively and imaginative a presence on the piano stool as some are in this cycle – Graham Johnson on Ian Bostridge’s early Hyperion recording, for example.

But none of that prevents this from being a beguiling performance, one delighting in the cycle’s melodic pleasures and Schubertian grace.