Here is a remarkable disc, whose marriage of artist and repertoire must have been made in some mythical, musical heaven.

As many German baritones have done before him, 33-year-old Samuel Hasselhorn is journeying from the world of the classic Lied exemplified by Schubert and Schumann to the more exotic and variegated pastures of post-Romanticism and early modernism both in song and opera.

This recording catches him doing so when his instrument is still at its freshest, youthful peak, full of subtle timbral variations and sensitive, intelligent delivery of text.

Take for example, the two songs he has chosen from Mahler’s Das Knaben Wunderhorn. Hasselhorn invests that sardonic denunciation of militarism, Revelge with increasing drama, freighting the onomatopoeic refrain with skilful, ironic colour. (The version sung by tenor Gösta Winberg in Riccardo Chailly’s otherwise well-regarded recording of the cycle sounds positively one-dimensional in comparison.)

By contrast, Urlicht (perhaps better known in its revised version for alto incorporated into the Resurrection Symphony) is sung with a disarming, simple...