Florian Boesch and Roger Vignoles were shortlisted for a BBC Music Magazine award for their first Hyperion album (Loewe Songs and Ballads). Boesch’s warm, sensuously attractive baritone voice, first-rate diction and remarkable acting ability were enthusiastically praised. Now the duo turn to a selection of Schubert’s Lieder from the dark heart of the repertoire.

‘Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück!’ (‘There, where you are not, is happiness!’)—‘Und das Dort ist niemals hier!’ (‘and the There is never here!’). The final lines of Der Wanderer (track 1) and Der Pilgrim (track 16) encapsulate a recurrent theme of German Romantic art: that of the rootless outsider. It is the world of Goethe’s mysterious Harper and Mignon, and of the solitary, silhouetted figures in the darker landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. In music it found its supreme expression, not only in Schubert’s Winterreise but in these many individual ‘wandering’ songs: some grimly resigned, some serenely contemplative, others imbued with a sense of physical and spiritual isolation and longing for an ultimately unattainable ‘otherness’.