According to Schubert’s friends, the composition of Winterreise in 1827, a year before his death, left the composer agitated and disturbed. Wilhelm Müller’s poetic journey starts with Gute Nacht, as a traveller walks away from us into a moonlit, snowy landscape. At the end of the cycle, The Signpost, he takes the path to his death. All very close to the bone for a composer with a terminal illness, and the first performance duly shocked his contemporaries. It’s good to report, then, that this superb, bold and harrowing new interpretation by the Austrian baritone Florian Boesch and English pianist Malcolm Martineau may just shock a whole new generation.

There are big choices here but crucially, every moment of this intimate collaboration has been thought through. Each emotional twist and turn is presented as another step on Schubert’s solitary winter journey, from the abandoned home of his loved one to a lonely grave. Boesch may not have an idiosyncratic voice like Fischer-Dieskau or Matthias Goerne, but he certainly has an individual style and a special way with poetry. His vocal mood-swings and unprecedented use of half-tones – at times more popular songster than classical lieder singer – sets...