Not usually a paragon of moderation or elegance, Bo Skovhus has continued his traversal of Schubert Lieder with a Winterreise recording that’s not for connoisseurs with a deep sense of the piece’s recorded history but something that challenges what you thought was best for this oft-recorded (maybe over-recorded) song-cycle. In the first few seconds, ‘Gute Nacht’ isn’t a wounded trudge into into the winter netherworlds. Here, the song-cycle’s protagonist is briskly fleeing society, perhaps as much a hunted criminal as a rejected lover. At the other tempo extreme is ‘Wasserflut’, which feels like a deep and sudden realisation of loneliness at its most existential.

In between, the pianist Stefan Vladar – a big presence here – keeps each song moving at a firm pulse, almost as a clear frame that contains Skovhus’s vivid range of emotion. Songs such as ‘Auf dem Flusse’ can wind down into repetitive self-pity, but not with these two. ‘Frühlingstraum’ in particular shows Skovhus singing with the palest of exhalations one moment and a Bayreuth bark in another. One sign of a credible Winterreise is how hallucinatory moments are handled: the protagonist’s incredulity at seeing himself as a white-haired old man in ‘Der greise Kopf’ is beautifully done, while the final song, ‘Der Leiermann’, is a well-sustained decrescendo with sensitive articulation of the text until the emotional gasp of the final lines.

On the opera stage, Skovhus is sometimes guilty of doing certain things for pure effect. Here, he has studied the text with a depth that doesn’t permit falling into mannerism. Only his tendency to cut off phrases a nanosecond before their logical conclusion tells you he may not be born to sing this repertoire.

What separates this pair’s brand of originality from the 1979 Peter Schreier/Sviatoslav Richter set – my Winterreise of choice – is multiplicity of meaning. Skovhus explores an emotion to its depths, while Scherier starts at such depths and then goes to any number of other places as the song progresses. There are moments in ‘Einsamkeit’ when Vladar enters the Richter zone of deep comprehension. Even when not quite there, he has startling insights with buried details arising in ways that almost feel confrontational.