The third volume of Malcolm Martineau’s Mendelssohn survey turns away from Felix to focus on songs by his sister, Fanny Hensel, ‘the other Mendelssohn’, whose work, long ignored or devalued because of her gender, is now mercifully undergoing a process of reappraisal. Though her Lieder, like her brother’s, can be uneven, the best of them reveal a strikingly original imagination, rooted in a considered, nuanced approach to her chosen texts. One could argue that she lacks Felix’s wit. Yet she takes us into darker, altogether more troubling territory than he in terms of harmony and emotion. There is much here that deserves to be better known.

Seesawing shifts between major and minor keys probe ambiguities of feeling in ‘Ich kann wohl manchmal singen’ and ‘Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass?’ The latter, hinting at sexual betrayal, has a real sting in its tail. Bach informs both Hensel’s vocal writing and her use of pianistic counterpoint in her setting of Goethe’s ‘Gegenwart’, its loftiness thrown into sharp relief here by its juxtaposition with the Schiller song ‘Der Eichwald brauset’, with its Sturm und Drang turbulence. ‘Im Herbst’ opens with a sequence of truly startling dissonances, while ‘Die frühen Gräber’, a setting of Klopstock at his most despairing, is a remarkable confrontation with mortality, as a high vocal line meanders over immovable, penumbral chords, low in the piano.

Martineau’s programme is carefully crafted to emphasise points of contrast not only between individual songs but also between four very different singers. There are two baritones, and throughout Manuel Walser’s lyrical introversion offsets Gary Griffiths’s darker sound and greater declamatory fire. Walser is at his best in a moodily elegant group of Heine songs near the disc’s midpoint. Griffiths responds to the drama of ‘Im Herbst’ and the nobility of ‘Gegenwart’ with considerable intensity and power. Susana Gaspar’s silvery soprano sounds exquisite in ‘Die Mainacht’ and unearthly in ‘Die frühen Gräber’, and she brings real passion to ‘Der Eichwald brauset’. With only three songs, Kitty Whately has less to do than one would wish, though ‘Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass?’ is a high point, as is her impetuous ‘Nach Süden’ towards the disc’s close. Martineau binds everything together, meanwhile, with playing of great dexterity and eloquence.