This is a fine and enjoyable debut from yet another outstanding young pair of UK song interpreters. Rather than offering standard fare, though, baritone Nicholas Mogg and pianist Jâms Coleman dive deep into German Romanticism as captured in the songs and ballads of Carl Loewe. They are both clearly big fans of the ‘North German Schubert’, as Loewe was somewhat clunkily dubbed by Prince Albert, and make a deeply persuasive case for him.

Comparisons with Schubert – who was born a year after Loewe but died over 40 years before him – are inevitable, but Loewe’s musical world is in many ways more closely related to Mendelssohn and Wolf, especially when it comes to conveying the sprites and spirits that inhabit the forests of the Romantic imagination. While Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’ is all white-hot drama, for example, Loewe’s – the ‘Other Erlking’ of the album’s title – is more carefully etched, its detail, as Richard Stokes suggests in his booklet essay, much closer to Goethe’s poem.

Mogg and Coleman capture its world beautifully, with the baritone’s voice – relatively light but reassuringly incisive in timbre – conveying an impressive range and the pianist bringing real drama and virtuosity to the accompaniment. The other ballads, several admired by Wagner, are no less successful: ‘Herr Oluf’ has a compelling narrative drive, ‘Odins Meeresritt’ brilliantly conveys the illustrative detail of Loewe’s writing and ‘Edward’, though not quite offering the dramatic intensity of the young Fischer-Dieskau, is still grimly satisfying. The delightful ‘Tom der Reimer’ is guaranteed to bring a smile.

They make a very strong case for several other songs, too, including Loewe’s touching setting of ‘Über alle Gipfeln ist Ruh’. But here one also senses the composer’s limitations. Nothing is ever less than impeccably crafted but there’s rarely much sense of psychological depth beneath the surface. For me, moreover, some of the more sentimental songs teeter rather too close to tweeness, even kitsch.

Still, it’s good to hear these pieces, too seldom represented on disc, and welcome this handsome, intelligent and beautifully recorded debut from two fine artists.