This diverse selcetion of cycles and individual songs—the first of a two part release also featuring John Mark Ainsley—show Beethoven’s searching approach to word setting in a range running from the operatic to the comic, the ephemeral to the more substantial. Williams’s subtle baritone adapts to each challenge—tongue-in-cheek as he spins the tale of Goethe’s Flea in Beethoven’s itchy setting, touching and sombre in Of Death from the Six Gellert Songs, suitably boorish in Beethoven’s The Travails of a Bore. Joining him, the rich-toned mezzo Ann Murray is also fine, particularly in the four subtly different versions of Goethe’s Sehnsucht, while Iain Burnside is sensitive, vibrant and animated.