Fink’s second Schumann song disc falls into two halves, as in a live lieder recital. The climax of the Argentine mezzo’s programme is, appropriately, the Eichendorff Liederkreis, a masterpiece of the composer’s annus mirabilis of song, 1840, an outpouring of joy as he achieved his long-frustrated desire to marry his former pupil, Clara Wieck. From much later, indeed shortly before syphilitic madness brought his career to an abrupt, devastating close, come the Mary Stuart songs, settings of poems allegedly written by the Scottish queen on her exile from France, on the birth of her son, on her unfulfilled longing to meet her cousin Elizabeth I, a farewell to the world and a prayer to God to grant salvation to her soul. In German translations by Gisbert von Vincke, they must have appealed to the despairing composer as he prepared to take his leave. They are among his most austere and bleak songs, too rarely performed, although Fink sang them at an Edinburgh Festival recital a few years ago. Here, she prefaces them intelligently with six of Schumann’s Myrten, folk song-like settings of Wilhelm Gerhard’s translations of Robert Burns. Fink is at her most artless in these lovely songs, her limpid mezzo exploiting all the colours at her disposal, her diction always eloquent and idiomatic, and her storytelling direct and unmannered. Spiri is her unassuming pianist, more accompanist than the equal partner Schumann’s piano-writing suggests, but everything he does, like Fink, sounds unforced and intrinsically musical.

Harmonia Mundi HMC902031

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