Schumann’s bittersweet Heine cycle of love frustrated and love betrayed heads the billing here. But as in earlier volumes of Malcolm Martineau’s decade-by-decade journey, the range is wide and unpredictable: from the songs Dargomizhsky wrote for his St Petersburg students, via little-known mélodies by César Franck, to gentle lyrics by Adolf Lindblad once popularised by Jenny Lind. If mellifluous grace rules, all the songs, many of them virtually unknown, give pleasure. Martineau’s singers have fresh, youthful voices and care for their words, while his own playing, not least in the Schumann, is as sensitively weighted and coloured as ever.

With her darkly sensuous timbre, Anush Hovhannisyan is a vivid advocate for Dargomizhsky, whether in the seductive playfulness of ‘Night breeze’ or the faintly risqué innocence of ‘Sixteen years old’. In an all-too-brief appearance, the baritone Alexey Gusev relishes the comic brio of Dargomizhsky’s ‘Confession’, in which a man becomes besotted by his own female double. Dargomizhsky’s songs, like Tchaikovsky’s after him, belong to the French salon romance tradition represented by four attractive, Gounodesque mélodies by César Franck. Nick Pritchard’s dulcet lyric tenor and shapely phrasing are just what is needed here, whether in the nostalgic ‘Souvenance’ or the diaphonous, shimmering ‘Le sylphe’.

Oliver Johnston is aptly ardent, if less than perfectly even, in the amorous grieving of two Donizetti songs. And the pellucid-toned Ida Evelina Ränzlöv – a lovely singer – brings tenderness and unselfconscious charm to three Lindblad songs, above all the beguiling ‘En sommardag’. Samuel Hasselhorn lacks a true legato in Mendelssohn’s fervent ‘Nachtlied’ and rather misses the nocturnal secrecy of ‘Venetianisches Gondellied’, but his healthy baritone is well displayed in the sturdy, rustic march of ‘Warnung vor dem Rhein’, where a father warns his son against the dangerous lure of women, symbolised by the Lorelei.

You’ll listen in vain for a smooth, ‘bound’ line, too, in Florian Boesch’s idiosyncratic performance of Schumann’s Op 24 Liederkreis. Heine’s persona, as refracted through Schumann’s music, here veers between trance-like introspection and desultory protest. Much of the cycle unfolds in a confiding, half-whispered speech-song, with phrases trailing off distractedly. If you want Schumann’s lyric melodies given full value, look elsewhere. Yet in close partnership with Martineau, Boesch’s haunted, disturbed reading is oddly mesmerising. Any collector of this revelatory series is going to want this new disc, whose attractions, as before, are enhanced by superb, wide-ranging notes from Susan Youens.