The beautiful, burnished glow of Matthias Goerne’s voice perfectly suits this recital of late Romantic Austro-German Lieder. Perfectly partnered by Seong-Jin Cho, this recital will delight Goerne fans...The closing ‘Im Abendrot’, a song of long companionship, nature and death, brought a lump to my throat, its huge vocal-technical demands successfully masked.

Worth noting first is the recorded sound, in which his baritone – its velvet timbre now pleasingly weathered, with big, deep breaths part of the phrasing – is placed in a hazy, resonant foreground, his pianist somewhat recessed...Cho’s playing is a model of luxurious sensitivity.

Hearing Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder sung by a low male voice proves quite revelatory here, with Goerne tapping into the songs’ intimacy rather than the full-throttle grandeur that’s often to the fore on orchestral recordings with soprano. Cho also proves himself a superbly nuanced song-pianist, bringing real poetry to the introduction of Im Triebhaus and navigating the fireworks of Pfitzner’s Stimme der Sehnsucht with élan.

Ultimately this album is about one thing, namely, that Goerne's voice has reached an absolute peak and that the repertory here displays it at its absolute best. Pick your adjective: it's rich, it's burnished, it's philosophical, it's quietly shining with a lifetime of experience. Whatever your choice, this is a lieder album to treasure.