Launched by Malcolm Martineau with a splendid percussive vigour, the equestrian night ride of ‘Auf der Brücke’ makes an invigorating entrée to this conspectus of song in the 1820s. Schubert in his ripest mastery rightly has prime billing. But as in Vol 1 of Martineau’s decade-by-decade traversal (7/16), the range is wide and unpredictable, embracing seven composers and four languages. I confess I’d never heard Swiss composer Louis Niedermeyer’s once-popular setting of Lamartine’s ‘Le lac’, which begins as a portentous operatic scena and ends as a gently rippling romance. But I’m glad I have now, especially as sung by the fresh-voiced tenor Robin Tritschler. New to me, too, were the Glinka songs, whose mix of Italianate bel canto lyricism and Russian melancholy is thrillingly caught by the flame-toned Armenian soprano Anush Hovhannisyan – surely a name to watch.

Elsewhere in this enterprising programme, John Mark Ainsley brings thoughtful, shapely phrasing to the teenage Schumann’s rather Schubertian ‘Sehnsucht’ – his first surviving song – and Mendelssohn’s mellifluous ‘Minnelied im Mai’, folk song refined for the salon. Christopher Maltman, with his histrionic flair and colouristic range, is in his element in the quasi-operatic dialogues of Loewe’s chillingly atmospheric ‘Erlkönig’ (which Wagner, for one, rated above Schubert’s) and ‘Herr Oluf’, another variation on the Danish Erlking legend. The Portuguese tenor Luis Gomes has the right vibrant, Latin timbre for three limpid romances by Bellini, though on this evidence a tenderly softened tone is not in his vocal armoury.

More tonal variety, and a more liquid legato, would have made Ainsley’s sensitive performance of Schubert’s gently hypnotic ‘Der Winterabend’ even better. And Maltman struck me as too emphatic, lacking in grace, in the delicious Venetian barcarolle ‘Gondelfahrer’. But his incisive, virile baritone and expressive German (matched by few English singers) make for an exhilarating ‘Auf der Brücke’; and he eloquently exploits both his hieratic bass resonance and his plaintive tenor register in the solemn Mayrhofer setting ‘Aus Heliopolis’. Sarah Connolly’s deliriously impassioned singing of the apocalyptic ‘Auflösung’ is a reminder of her superb Covent Garden Brangäne. In lyric mode, she brings an ideal tenderness of tone and feeling to Ellen’s three songs from Scott’s Lady of the Lake. All the while Malcolm Martineau, recorded with welcome prominence, is the most observant and imaginative of pianist partners, whether as a vivid one-man orchestra in the Loewe ballads or in the exquisitely voiced counterpoints of ‘Im Frühling’ and ‘Der Winterabend’.