Designed for the amateur domestic market, Dvořák’s settings of Moravian folk poems captivate with their lyrical grace (Dvořák was as adept as Brahms at creating quasi-folk tunes that sound like the real thing), rhythmic piquancy and nonchalant touches of contrapuntal interplay. Encouraged by Christoph Berner’s zesty, colourful accompaniments, Genia Kühmeier and Bernarda Fink give thoroughly delightful performances, combining eager characterisation – say, in the melancholy dialogue of No 7 or the lovers’ tiff of No 12 – with a crucial sense of spontaneous enjoyment.

Framing the duets, soprano and mezzo share the honours in Dvořák’s two best-known solo song collections. Singing in what sounds like idiomatic Czech, Kühmeier catches both the flaring intensity and the nostalgic tenderness of the Gypsy Songs. Her pure, rather ‘instrumental’ tone has now acquired richer, more complex shadings. She floats her high notes exquisitely in a touching account of ‘And the forest is silent’, builds to a climax of passionate intensity in ‘Songs my mother taught me’ and, lustily abetted by Berner, brings a dangerous Zigeuner wildness to ‘The strings are tuned’ – a contrast to Bernarda Fink’s beautifully sung but more contained performance on her all-Dvořák recital (7/04).

Fink’s art, founded on warm, evenly produced tone and scrupulous care for phrasing and verbal clarity, has always had a certain patrician restraint. In the often troubled Biblical Songs, written in New York as Dvořák’s father lay dying in distant Bohemia, she reveals a more impassioned temperament than I had previously suspected, whether in the anxious declamation of No 6, ‘Hear my cry, O God’, or the fervent climaxes of No 7, ‘By the waters of Babylon’. At the other end of the spectrum, Fink finds a joyous brightness within her darkly glowing mezzo for the catchy dance rhythms of the final ‘O sing unto the Lord’, with Christoph Berner – crucial to the success of this whole recital – realising the accompaniment’s cosmic murmurs with fleet-fingered delicacy.