The Schubert shelves (if those of our readers are anything like mine) bend and groan and are full to overflowing, but they’ll have to find room for one more. This is a simply unmissable recital, and for two prime reasons – the grave beauty of its programme and the corresponding beauty of the singer’s voice. I had not heard Goerne for a year or more and, to tell the truth, had grown rather distant in sympathy towards an artist who clearly took his art very seriously and yet seemed in recent years to have offered no very valuable insights. Moreover (though this hardly affects his recordings) his platform manner had become, in my view, distractingly idiosyncratic. But that is all cancelled for the present by the loveliness of his even-voiced tone and the sensitivity of his response to all that he has to sing here.

And the selection and collocation of songs are wonderfully made so as to define a particular frame of mind and sustain and develop it. The haunting Schiller setting “Die Götter Griechenlands”, with its ghostly evocation of the Rosamunde Quartet, is seminal. Throughout the recital, an occasional harmony or melodic sequence recalls it to mind, and the horns of “Griechenland” are heard faintly blowing in the last song of all, the Mayrhofer “Abschied”. These are ernste Gesänge, every one of them, yet there is nothing meanly austere or ponderously sententious. These songs of yearning, essentially spiritual, are very personal, and the imagination never shuts down.

The pianist, Ingo Metzmacher, is fully responsive to this, and the recorded sound, of both voice and piano, is warm and vivid. Regrettable, but I suppose unavoidable, are the audible intakes of breath. I’m not interested in the “bonus” DVD called “The Making of the Recording”. I am interested in the notes, by Christophe Ghristi, which start as an uncommonly thoughtful engagement with the concept of the recital and are diverted into a commentary on the 19th-century tenors Nourrit and Duprez.