Alice Coote has been successfully portraying men for years, but usually she’s done it with aid of wigs and costumes, in breeches roles like Orfeo, Idamante and Octavian. This disc, recorded live at the Wigmore Hall last year, finds her essaying a different sort of male role: that of the haunted protagonist in Schubert’s Winterreise.

Coote is not the first female singer to take on the cycle, but it’s still predominantly the domain of tenors (the voice for which the songs were originally written) and baritones. In Coote, Schubert’s great and harrowing work finds yet another distinctive interpreter. Her velvety, contralto-ish voice is laced with mournful sweetness, and she takes a refreshingly simple, naturalistic approach: there’s no micromanaging of phrases or belaboured angst, just a subtle dissection of a disintegrating soul, whose occasional outpourings – the tempestuous Der stürmische Morgen, for instance, or the tearful urgency of Erstarrung – are made all the more potent by the slow burn which precedes them.

Coote has a full and telling palette of vocal colours at her disposal, from an eerily pretty Wasserflut to the introspective glow of Der greise Kopf and the stripped- back tone of Die Krähe. She’s not afraid to let a...