The lovelorn miller’s lad of Schubert’s song cycle has of late been spending rather a lot of time on the psychoanalyst’s couch.

Performances and recordings of Die schöne Müllerin within the past decade have tended to close-focus on the self-lacerating angst of the lovesick swain: individual words and stinging harmonies have been exploited to point up the pre-Freudian subtext of the poet’s simple words.

Thomas Quasthoff, though, will have none of this. His protagonist sets out in rude health, pitting a robust and purposeful tread against the clatter of the mill wheel (Charles Spencer is the stage-managing pianist) and the crosscurrents of the little brook. Quasthoff’s joy in words makes each one live along the line. And, at least until the midpoint of the cycle, his heart is like an open and none too complex book.

This doesn’t mean that Quasthoff’s Müllerin lacks subtlety: he fines his huge bass-baritone down to a murmuring half-voice as he plays the “she loves me, she loves me not” game with the brook. This is all the more impressive considering that this is not the ideal song cycle for a bass-baritone. Unlike Winterreise or Schwanengesang, much of the Müllerin seems, in Quasthoff’s range, either too low for the ear, or too high not to overtax the voice. And there were moments when I longed for a firmer hand from Spencer’s hypersensitive accompanying.

When the dastardly Hunter appears, it’s all over for the miller’s lad. The relationship he carried on entirely in his head is now confronted with harsh reality. Quasthoff resists the temptation to go into obsession overdrive, and instead uses the sheer weight and colour of his bass-baritone to plumb the depths of jealousy and anger.

And then, a small miracle. As Spencer eloquently tolls away at one obsessively repeated note in Die liebe Farbe, Quasthoff’s voice becomes drained of all colour. In the last three songs he sings in a new, endlessly smooth legato, creating a sense of peace of mind, all passion spent. As his voice sheds the weight of the earth, Schubert and Quasthoff seem to be saying that life is now in the past tense; and it is song itself that will continue on and on, as an endless metamorphosis of human experience.