Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton are recording so much these days that it’s hard to find a new vocal disc without one, the other or both. ‘Elysium: A Schubert Recital’ showcases them in core repertoire in a programme themed around songs concerning the afterlife. Authority and intelligence are evident in song choices, sequencing and performance in this somewhat soft-spoken disc that’s surely among their best.

The first song, ‘Schwestergruss’ (which depicts ghostly, benevolent apparitions) begins with the piano suggesting the slowish, muted tolling of a death bell. From there, imagery from poets including Rückert, Schiller and Goethe is full of tears, rapture, dreams and nocturnal moon and stars. The final song, curiously, is a melodrama for speaker and piano titled ‘Farewell to the Earth’, adapted from Adolf von Pratobevera’s play Der Falke, ending with the line ‘every sorrow will smile gently, and joy will hold in its embrace of the pure, tranquil heart’.

One is surprised, even taken aback, by how familiar songs in the recital fall into line with the disc’s overall theme. ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’ is performed with a special lilt in keeping with the poem’s imagery of water and waves, but the closing twist has the poem’s protagonist vanishing ‘from the flux of time’. The recital isn’t all heavenly: ‘Die junge Nonne’ talks of death as a respite from inner turmoil – conveyed by the piano-writing.

Close attention to words is particularly important in a programme where some songs earn a place at the table for their poetic content, such as ‘An den Mond’, D259, which has eight stanzas of good Goethe with modest, strophic music. ‘An den Mond’, D193, a completely different text and song, has first and last verses with more musical depth than one would expect from its early catalogue number, but is heard here in a version published two years before the composer’s death. It’s a find.

The theme imposes a particular viewpoint upon Sampson’s interpretations. In contrast to Ernst Haefliger’s attempts to flatten out the range of ideas in ‘An den Mond’, D193, into a more consistent manner (DG, 9/60), Sampson and Middleton meet each stanza on their own sometimes quirky terms, both here and in other songs in this collection. The literary content benefits, and the diversity of manner keeps an ethereal sameness from setting in over the disc as a whole. We’re also reminded that the afterlife is full of alternative logic. Schubert’s song ‘Elysium’, for one, has a bit of the playfulness one associates with the vision of heaven in Mahler’s Symphony No 4.

On a more detailed level, Sampson effectively changes dynamics in parts of poems that look forward to or inhabit the afterlife. Sampson is at her best in the nocturnal ‘Nacht und Träume’, with a masterly balance of word articulation and legato line. Few singers so effectively build the tension of a song with a slow expansion of tone, especially in the sublime ‘Du bist die Ruh’. It seems that the more she records, the better she gets.