Few composers are quite so easily ruined in performance as Hugo Wolf. For many, he represents the holy of holies of lieder writers, and countless singers have tackled him with reverential awe, all too frequently swamping him in nuanced archness, or turning him into a deadly serious purveyor of psychological tragedies. That such an approach can be limiting, however, is seemingly not lost on soprano Christiane Oelze, baritone Olaf Bär and pianist Helmut Deutsch, whose performance of the Italienisches Liederbuch firmly placed the emphasis on the comic and sensual aspects of his genius.

The Liederbuch itself consists of 46 aphoristic love songs, which, taken together, form an extended meditation on the vagaries of passion. There's no canonical running order, and Bär and Oelze fashioned them into five separate sequences, each hinting at meetings and partings, betrayals, rows and reconciliations. The tone throughout was worldly. Bär's patrician tenderness was sharply contrasted with Oelze's manipulative flightiness. The sudden plunges into sadness and regret, meanwhile, were wonderfully done, throwing the wit of the rest of it into sharp relief.

There were occasional flaws. Oelze, for the most part flame-toned and glorious, sometimes swallowed her words, while Bär had momentary intonation problems at the beginning. Deutsch, probing and intelligent when accompanying the singers, tended to let rip over-emphatically in the postludes. Throughout, however, the spontaneity of all three proved gripping, reminding us that Wolf ranks among the most joyous of composers, as well as among the greatest.