After Winterreise (4/14) and Schwanengesang (A/19), Gerald Finley and Julius Drake arrive at Die schöne Müllerin. As with the previous releases in this leisurely series, Finley makes the music compellingly his own: with his Rolls-Royce bass-baritone on smooth, luxurious form throughout, there’s no sense of him trying to capture the youthfulness of the Miller boy – he leaves that, rather, to the tenors and lighter-voiced baritones.

Nor does he throw himself overtly into the drama; that he leaves, in many ways, to Drake, whose superbly played piano accompaniments bristle with life and detail, making a virtue of the lower keys to convey extra dramatic weight. What Finley offers is sober, wise and exquisitely sung – don’t expect rankling bitterness or frustration à la late Bostridge – and he trusts the words and the melodic line to convey their power without an extra helping hand.

There’s never any danger of the performances not being engaging, though, and the more one listens, the more one notices the subtle touches: holding the first note of each verse of ‘Das Wandern’, as if breathing in the air before striding off down a favourite path; the dreaminess of ‘Pause’; the playfulness of ‘Mit dem grünen Lautenbande’; the gradual slowing at the end of ‘Der Müller und der Bach’ to accompany the gradual diminuendo.

The sheer beauty of some of the slower numbers – ‘Danksagung an den Bach’, for example, or ‘Der Neugierige’ – is irresistible, but never seems to exist for its own sake. At the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, there’s no lack of Schwung in the livelier songs, with a rollicking ‘Mein’, and both ‘Der Jäger’ and ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’ going at a good lick.

Occasionally one misses the brightness of the original keys and the vocal excitement of a tenor’s top notes – Finley’s voice is never really stretched – but that feels part and parcel of an interpretative approach that is controlled and considered, with pianist and singer perfectly in accord, their artistry shining through in every bar. With a beautifully hushed ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’, moreover, it proves as moving a recording of the cycle as any I’ve heard in a long time. All in all, another superb album from this artistic partnership, and beautifully recorded by Hyperion, too.