Wolfgang Holzmair’s 1999 recording of Die schöne Müllerin with Imogen Cooper has long been admired for its freshness and expressive immediacy. Five years earlier at the Wigmore Hall, in what proved to be pianist Geoffrey Parsons’s final public appearance, he ‘lives’ the cycle even more intensely, prepared to sacrifice vocal finish to the impulse of the moment. The early songs are all impetuous eagerness, rising to manic delirium in ‘Am Feierabend’ (where Holzmair lingers almost masochistically over the miller-maid’s ‘Allen eine gute Nacht’) and ‘Ungeduld’. Here and occasionally elsewhere, pitch and rhythm can blur under the pressure of emotion, with phrases delivered in a near-Sprechgesang.

Even the reflective songs have an urgent, restless undertow. If I craved a more rapt legato in ‘Danksagung an den Bach’ and ‘Der Neugierige’ – both of which tend to surge and billow – Holzmair’s spontaneous ardour is fair compensation. He and the ever-sentient (if slightly too recessed) Parsons make the three long strophic songs at the cycle’s centre urgent rather than dreamy, imaginatively varying the expression from verse to verse, and convey an ecstatic abandon in ‘Mein’, the miller’s moment of imagined triumph in love. With the arrival of the macho huntsman, Holzmair graphically embodies the miller’s mingled impotent fury and desolation. ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’ is especially vivid, from the sneering bitterness of ‘mit langem Halse’ (nice girls don’t crane their necks to gawp at passing hunters), through the sudden pathos of ‘doch sag ihr nicht’, to the mounting despair beneath the feigned insouciance of the last verse. Crucially, too, the two final songs have a sense of cathartic release, with Holzmair floating an unearthly pianissimo in the closing verse of ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’.

While this isn’t the most scrupulously sung Schöne Müllerin on offer (the studio recording with Cooper is better in this respect), Holzmair’s sympathetic, tenorish baritone and quicksilver response to mood and verbal nuance are never less than compelling. It joins the handful of favourite baritone versions listed below, its claims enhanced by Holzmair’s wonderfully innig performances of Schubert’s two ‘Wandrers Nachtlieder’ as encores.