You can always rely on Helen Charlston for a thoughtful recital. So, when the British mezzo decided to record Dichterliebe – the song-cycle, as she explains in the sleeve notes, that “… has beguiled me for as long as I can remember” – of course she didn’t simply pair it with more Schumann.

Instead, treating Heinrich Heine’s verse as a bridge across voices and ages, we get a fascinating handful of framing settings: from the composer’s contemporaries, but also in the form of a newly commissioned cycle by Heloise Werner. The result is playful, poetic and exquisitely performed.

Opening the recording with Carl Loewe’s Die Lotosblume (though Schumann’s own better-known setting does follow later) is inspired. Rolling the text around her mouth with infinite languor, Charlston brings an almost cabaret freedom to this daring, sensual song. This freedom, coupled with the stern beauty of her darkly pure mezzo, creates a friction that animates the whole programme. Pianist Sholto Kynoch adds to the tensions, supplying a blowsier, more expansive voice to the dialogue – often coaxing Charlston to unbend still further.

Werner’s A Knight’s Dream prefaces the Schumann, drifting into it in a meditative, wordless postlude that nods to Dichterliebe’s own. Werner’s sequence of poems – hear both straight and in fragments, in German and in English – creates a hyper-narrative. Is this really a knight whose dreams we enter, or (as Der Ritter sitzt wieder suggests) it is perhaps the poet himself, bullied into fantasy-retreat from life?

It’s a ravishing set of songs. Opener Es war mal ein Ritter is a memory of a folksong, coming slowly into focus among ambient sounds and words spoken by Kynoch – the tentative scene takes focus in the leaping lover’s heartbeat of Da kommt seine Leibste, before the fever-dream reaches its peak in Der Ritter and sound is divorced from meaning. Charlston lets text lead the way, precise in her shadings, rhetorical in her delivery, bouncing off Kynoch’s crisply articulated piano. These spare textures – lieder distilled down to its essence – set off the richness of the Schumann that follows.

Charlston joins a still surprisingly select group of women who have recorded the cycle, and her Dichterliebe holds its own against the recent likes of Alice Coote’s, with more than a touch of Suzanne Danco’s classic account in her careful diction and sober tone. But there’s more weight here than a soprano can marshal, and Charlston deploys it selectively; Im Rhein startles with charry intensity, and the floodgates are fully opened in Ich grolle nicht. 

What’s consistent throughout is a recitative-like freedom, stretching strophic songs into newly flexible shapes. Kynoch pulls things around more consciously than some; his introduction to Im Wunderschonen Monat Mai suggests a more indulgent cycle than the one that follows, but it makes for a compelling debate: Charlston’s gentler, self-contained resignation winning over by the time we arrive at the fragile final postlude.

Listen on Apple Music

Composers: Schumann, Heloise Werner
Works: Dichterliebe, A Knight’s Dream
Performers: Helen Charlston ms, Sholto Kynoch p
Label: BIS BIS-2704