Tacked on by the publisher to avoid the unlucky number 13, ‘Die Taubenpost’ can seem a charming irrelevancy after Schwanengesang’s anguished Heine settings. Like several other singers, including Brigitte Fassbaender, Nathalie Stutzmann sensibly avoids potential culture shock by offering ‘Die Taubenpost’ as an aperitif, separating it from the Rellstab and Heine groups with a clutch of popular Schubert songs. As ever, she commands attention with her deep and androgynous-sounding contralto, often suggesting a vibrant countertenor with a formidable baritonal downward extension. She is a thoughtful interpreter, too, responding strongly to the mordancy and disenchantment of the Heine songs (‘Der Atlas’, more rueful than barnstorming, is especially effective), and lightening her tone tellingly for a tenderly confiding ‘Die Taubenpost’.

Yet Stutzmann is not a singer I readily warm to. A prime problem, immediately evident in ‘Die Taubenpost’ but more damaging in, say, ‘Der Wanderer’ and ‘In der Ferne’, is her tendency to squeeze notes rather than sing a true, firm legato. She is better in ‘Am Meer’, probably (with ‘Nacht und Träume’) the cruellest test of legato in all Schubert. Yet even here a lack of absolute ‘bowed’ evenness detracts from an evidently deeply felt interpretation. Elsewhere she can be dangerously free with rhythm, as in ‘Liebesbotschaft’, which she presumably intends to sound dreamy but to my ears comes over as soupily indulgent. Another irritant is the semi-spoken patter she favours in some of the faster songs. In Fischerweise, for instance, she alternates between spikey parlando and swooping portamenti. Auf der Bruck should convey a mingled bravado and unease; here it sounds more like a flustered tongue-twister, with high notes suddenly ballooning from nowhere.

Brigitte Fassbaender, Stutzmann’s obvious rival in Schwanengesang, has an equally distinctive voice, and one that you would never describe as conventionally beautiful. But there the similarities end. Fassbaender’s tone-production is far more even and she invariably locates the music’s nerve-ends, whether in the erotic yearning of ‘Ständchen’ (Stutzmann sounds dour and depressive by comparison) or the terrifying immediacy and emotional truth she brings to the Heine songs. Fassbaender also benefits from the boldly inventive, almost expressionist playing of Aribert Reimann, whereas Inger Södergren, slightly clangily recorded, is no more than serviceable, and often too loud.