‘A weary traveller, very much in six-league boots’ was the late Alan Blyth’s less than euphoric verdict on Kurt Moll’s Winterreise when it emerged on CD in 1986. There have been few satisfying bass versions of Schubert’s cycle of existential gloom. This certainly isn’t one of them. Rightly admired in roles ranging from Ochs to King Mark and Gurnemanz, Moll never convinces in the private world of Lieder. Tempi are often numbingly slow, rubato indulgently, even grotesquely applied. Expression tends to veer between macho fist-shaking and lachrymose self-pity, with crudely applied touches of word-painting. Time and again Moll falls into the trap of getting louder as he gets higher (in any case, forte is his default setting); and when he attempts a pianissimo the pitch sags (the end of ‘Frühlingstraum’ is a disaster). Cord Garben’s rhythmically unimaginative accompaniment completes a depressingly superfluous reissue. If you want a bass in Winterreise, go for Hans Hotter or the recent recording by Matthew Rose.

A relief, then, to turn to the ever-rewarding Christoph Prégardien, finely abetted by Michael Gees’s discerning, precisely coloured pianism. Prégardien’s 1995 recording of Winterreise with Andreas Staier’s period fortepiano has long been a favourite of mine. He can still spin a plangent, silvered mezza voce, as at the aching close of ‘Irrlicht’. But his lower register has now grown robuster, more baritonal. Crucially, he ‘lives’ the cycle as vividly as ever, whether in the nostalgic reverie of ‘Der Lindenbaum’, the unappeasable longing of ‘Erstarrung’ or the mingled ruefulness and bitterness with which he contemplates the sleeping villagers of ‘Im Dorfe’ (with a hint of a sneer on ‘Kissen’). Nowhere is there a trace of sentimentality or self-pity. Like all the finest singers of Winterreise, Prégardien makes the wanderer’s snowbound journey a cathartic experience.

In the ‘bonus’ feature accompanying the DVD of the studio recording, the tenor explains that his view of Schubert’s jilted wanderer has shifted in the intervening years: ‘I’ve come to realise that death is not the central theme. The last few songs in the cycle contain such mighty outbursts that I feel sure that the wanderer goes on living.’ While differences between the two interpretations are often slight – though more apparent with the singer’s visual presence on the DVD – there is an added element of impassioned defiance amid the self-communing bleakness, as in the central verses of ‘Die Nebensonnen’.

As before, Prégardien ends ‘Der Leiermann’ not with a wail of anguish but with an almost compassionate address to the organ-grinder. ‘The wanderer accepts the organ-grinder as a partner in life. It’s a positive ending,’ he observes of the ever-enigmatic close. Prégardien’s is a valid view, certainly, though it’s worth remembering that the dramatist Eduard von Bauernfeld, who knew Schubert well in his last years, remarked that the composer saw the organ-grinder as a terrifying portent of what he himself might become in later life. While I wouldn’t want to watch the DVD too often (filmed at recording sessions), Prégardien remains at once one of the most scrupulous and moving interpreters of Winterreise. Among tenor recordings, this new CD takes its place alongside Peter Schreier, Mark Padmore and Prégardien himself, 1995 vintage.