Distant love and unfulfilled desires combine in this programme, projected with overwhelming fervour by Beethoven in the half dozen songs of An die ferne Geliebte and focused with sustained introspection by Schubert in his ‘Abendlied für die Entfernte’.

Wolfgang Rihm’s song cycle Das Rot (1990), a setting of six texts by the German Romantic poet Karoline von Günderrode, explores the shifting borderlands between illusion and reality, darkness and light.