'Light and Shadow’, the title of this second album in Samuel Hasselhorn’s Schubert 200 series, could apply to virtually any compilation of Schubert’s lieder. But it’s especially apt to the songs of 1824 25, years of crisis and renewal that began in despair and culminated in the composer’s holiday of a lifetime in the mountains of Upper Austria. The sheer scope of Schubert’s invention in these years takes the breath away: from the sublime simplicity of ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ and the numinous ‘Im Abendrot’ to the ecstatic death-longing of ‘Auflösung’ and the torrential grandeur of ‘Die Allmacht’, where Wagner is already glimpsed on the horizon.

As in his previous Schubert and Schumann albums, the young German baritone combines a warmly rounded tone, an imaginative range of colour and exemplary diction. He’s a natural in lieder; and his freshness and eagerness of response are priceless assets in Schubert. Yet the eagerness can occasionally become frenetic. Urged on by the technically superb Ammiel Bushakevitz, the Schulze settings ‘Auf der Bruck’ and ‘An mein Herz’ break all speed records. Their moments of yearning tenderness go for virtually nothing. Perhaps singer and pianist were intent on emphasising the mental instability of the poet, a notorious fantasist. The words, declaimed in a clipped semi-staccato, are crystal-clear. But both songs left me feeling battered.

Far more often, though, Hasselhorn and Bushakevitz’s probing of extremes brings rich rewards. Deploying a honeyed head voice, Hasselhorn beautifully catches the rapt, unearthly stillness of ‘Im Abendrot’ and ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ and the subtle emotional shifts of ‘Abendstern’, with its minor-major equivocations. Replete with violent contrasts of tone and dynamics, ‘Auflösung’ receives a performance of barely controlled delirium: exaggerated to some, perhaps, but to my ears an unflinching response to poetry and music that teeter on the brink of madness.

Schubertian charm and ease are in short supply in this particular selection of songs. And where there is potential for charm, as in ‘Der Einsame’, with its chirping cricket, Hasselhorn and Bushakevitz rather downplay it in favour of something edgier. I don’t think that even the omnivorous Fischer-Dieskau ever attempted ‘Die junge Nonne’. Inevitably the balance between voice and keyboard is altered when the vocal part is transposed down an octave. But like the finest female interpreters of Winterreise, Hasselhorn makes gender irrelevant with his dramatic flair and colouristic subtlety. The final ebbing to transcendent peace is profoundly moving.

Elsewhere Hasselhorn unfurls a bracing, ‘open’ tone for the Scott settings ‘Normans Gesang’ and ‘Lied des gefangenen Jägers’, with its crisp polonaise rhythms, and vividly characterises each phase of the rare mini-cantata ‘Heimweh’. I’ve yet to hear Hasselhorn in the flesh. But on disc, at least, he has the reserves of heroic power for ‘Fülle der Liebe’ and ‘Die Allmacht’, both of them mighty songs fashioned for Johann Michael Vogl on that 1825 summer holiday. ‘Die Allmacht’, especially, also typifies another of the baritone’s gifts: his ability to maintain and, where apt, increase tension over long spans. After the song’s Wotanesque climax, the sweet-sad dances that thread their way through this recital, played by Bushakevitz with subtly judged rubato, come as a perfect antidote. Roll on Vol 3.