Episodic ballads were hardly natural territory for Schumann, supreme master of the lyric epigram. Songs like ‘Belsatzar’ and the sprawling, potentially absurd ‘Die Löwenbraut’ (jealous pet lion savages his mistress on the eve of her marriage) need a vivid dramatic presence if they are not to fall flat. They get it here. Samuel Hasselhorn’s ductile baritone, with its dark middle register and free-ringing top, is a fine, wholesome instrument; and he uses it with imagination and an unexaggerated relish for the German language. From the ominous expectancy of Joseph Middleton’s introduction, ‘Belsatzar’ maintains tension right through to the hushed terror of the close – a terrific performance, this. ‘Die beiden Grenadiere’ traces a crescendo of delirious bravado before the final collapse (Middleton invariably makes something special of Schumann’s postludes). And with their mingled directness and colouristic flair, singer and pianist make a strong case for ‘Die Löwenbraut’, with its Hammer-horror climax, and another gory nonsense tale, ‘Die feindlichen Brüder’.

Hasselhorn is rewarding, too, in the set of Kerner Lieder, Op 35, loosely unified by moods of loneliness, loss and melancholy before fading in inconsolable reverie. He is fresh and open, without heartiness, in the two extrovert ‘wandering’ songs that tap into ‘Florestan’ in Schumann’s twin fictional personas. But the introspective ‘Eusebius’ rules, from the neo-Bachian ‘Stirb, Lieb’ und Freud’, where Hasselhorn musters a melting head voice for the heartbroken lover’s final words, through an unmawkish ‘Auf das Trinkglas eines verstorbenen Freundes’ (its mystical remote modulations palpably felt by singer and pianist), to the trancelike stillness of the last two songs.

For my taste Hasselhorn is too forthright in the Schumannised bel canto of ‘Stille Tränen’, though he and Middleton build fervently to the final climax. Other baritones, notably Fischer-Dieskau (DG, 9/79), Wolfgang Holzmair (Philips, 2/14) and Christian Gerhaher (Sony, 2/19), have brought more inwardness and a more silken legato to this hit song among the Kerner Lieder. I also wanted more delicacy, more of a smile in the tone, in the first and last of the five ‘exotically strange’ (Schumann’s epithet) Andersen songs, Op 40. But Hasselhorn is in his element in the three disturbing central songs: the sweet-sinister ‘Muttertraum’ (the final note of mockery perfectly judged), the grimly implacable ‘Der Soldat’, so prophetic of Mahler’s doomed drummer-boys, and the skewed, frantic waltz of ‘Der Spielmann’, brilliantly characterised by singer and pianist. Minor qualms apart, this is a compelling debut recital from a young baritone who is clearly one of the most gifted and natural lieder singers of his generation.