This latest release from the multi-award-winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake features a literary and musical form which inspired the greatest voices of German Romanticism. The foremost poets and composers of the age saw the ballad as a direct link to the folk-minstrels of the past. Frequently ghoulish and sensational in character, ballads satisfied the popular taste for the Gothic.

The musical world has not lacked for singers to interpret the songs of Edvard Grieg, starting with the composer's wife Nina and moving through the sublime Kirsten Flagstad to the sensual Anne Sofie von Otter. Grieg's songs have been well served by sopranos and mezzo-sopranos. In her second disc for Hyperion, Swedish mezzo Katarina Karnéus performs 25 of Grieg's 180 songs. Some are nearly folk songs sung in Norwegian; some are true art songs in German; but all are deeply expressive, highly emotional, and, in these performances, entirely successful.

Haydn’s songs, German and English, have never quite had the standing they deserve: two of the English canzonettas and one of the German songs here are not even in the current catalogue. Most often they are sung by sopranos, but there is no reason why a tenor shouldn’t be used; Haydn, a tenor, is known to have sung them himself. The performances here, by all three singers and Roger Vignoles’ alert and thoughtful accompanying perhaps plays a key role take them seriously and show them as the substantial music they are.

In his notes Graham Johnson says that what we have always lacked is a convincing way of performing late Schumann songs, often spare in texture and elusive in style. Well, he and Keenlyside seem to have found one here in their wholly admirable versions of the very different Opp 98a and 117. The Op 98a settings of the Harper's outpourings from Wilhelm Meister have always stood in the shade of those by Schubert and Wolf. This pair show incontrovertibly that there's much to be said for Schumann's versions, capturing the essence of the old man's sad musings, as set by the composer in an imaginative, free way, alert to every nuance in the texts.