Harriet Burns and Ian Tindale have emerged as a significant lieder partnership in recent years, though their Schubert album, surprisingly perhaps, is actually their first recording together. It’s a striking disc in many ways. The subject is the nature of love and desire, which constitutes a vast theme in Schubert’s songs, barely containable on a single disc, you might think. But the recital perceptively structures familiar and unfamiliar material to encompass both a wide range of mood and a convincing emotional narrative that takes us from calm to anguish and back again.

The ambiguities of ‘Freudvoll und leidvoll’ set out the parameters at the start, and the worldly contentment of ‘Seligkeit’ brings the recital to its close. In between come bawdy irony (‘Die Männer sind mechant’) and genuine eroticism (‘Suleika I’, ‘Heimliches Lieben’) before love turns obsessive with the grim Platen setting ‘Die Liebe hat gelogen’, and desire becomes murderous in ‘Der Zwerg’. The bittersweet ‘Viola’, reflecting on loss and natural renewal, resolves the resulting tensions at the effective climax, before the mood lightens and we are steered back towards brightness once more.

The performances are for the most part superb. The amplitude of Burns’s voice, with its bright warmth of tone and wonderful gleam at the top, confers a certain grandeur of scale on the proceedings, though her dynamic range is tellingly wide and often deployed with considerable subtlety. The way she moves from the assertively sweeping phrases of ‘Freudvoll und leidvoll’ to the rueful intimacy of ‘Lachen und Weinen’ at the start is particularly beautiful. Singing off the line as much as the words, she sounds exquisite in ‘Dass sie hier gewesen’, the unresolved chromaticism of which pre-empts Liszt, and later invests the Schiller setting ‘Amalia’, a mixture of recitative and arioso, with the declamatory dramatic weight of an operatic scena, which you suspect is what Schubert might have intended. ‘Viola’, meanwhile, at 12 minutes more cantata than song, is finely shaped and you’re repeatedly struck by the intensity both she and Schubert bring to so fragile a narrative.

Her tonal and dynamic range is matched by the expressive breadth of Tindale’s playing. The erratic heartbeats of ‘An mein Herz’, for instance, are powerfully and unashamedly hammered home, while subtle dynamic gradations mean that the elegant turns of ‘Hippolits Lied’, another study in obsession, gradually become increasingly creepy. You could argue that the closing section of ‘Suleika I’ is fractionally fast and doesn’t attain the calm rapture of Gundula Janowitz and Irwin Gage (DG, 11/77), and that the snarl with which Burns delivers the Dwarf’s opening words briefly tips ‘Der Zwerg’ precariously away from tragedy towards melodrama. There’s little doubt, however, of the strength of this partnership or the excellence of much of their music-making. A very fine disc indeed.