If you have a chance to sample before purchase [available from Naxos or Amazon sites], try the "Schäfers Klagelied" which just about sums it up; there is some beautiful piano playing (from a pianist whose contribution to Christiane Iven’s very fine disc of Mayrhofer lieder in this series has already been admired) and the vocal response is most sensitive. But come a few more dramatic moments and the upper notes acquire an unpleasantly harsh sound. Elsewhere on the disc we can hear that the high notes are clean and true when they are soft but gain this piercing quality when more pressure is put on them.

Ah well, you will say, not many of Schubert’s songs are dramatic anyway. Maybe so, but if you have to go through a whole CD with a singer slightly over-parted by the dramatic ones, it’s remarkable how many of them there seem to be. Still, all is not lost for there are also a tidy few soft and gentle ones that emerge "unerupted all round", as my dentist used to say when I was much younger. Indeed, looking around for comparisons I found I preferred Kalpers and Kehring in the second "Am Flusse" setting to Fischer-Dieskau and Moore (DG), who are surprisingly cavalier with it. But that is very much the exception; in "Geheimes", "Ester Verlust" and the second "Jägers Abendlied", just to name three, the Holy Writ as laid down by DF-D finds so much more in the music and words. And, admirable as Kehring is, he can be a mite aggressive at times, as I found when I took down the lovely performance of "Liebhaber in allen Gestalten" by Edith Wiens and Rudolph Jansen (CBC) and found the pianist radiating sheer delight in the music.

So all in all this is not one of those Naxos discs that would be a bargain at any price, but it’s a serviceable affair if you want to have some of Schubert’s best-known Goethe settings together with some of the rarest, of which the two unfinished ones, "Mahomets Gesang" and "Johanna Sebus", have quite extraordinarily elaborate and thrilling piano parts. You get full texts and English translations and the note by Joachim Landkanner, if nothing like the spread we get from Graham Johnson in the Hyperion series, is very informative. Among other things it comments that "Wilkommen und Abschied" illustrates the word "Glück" (happiness) with "a shining C major". Would it did, Mr. Landkanner, for it’s sung in D here and the lower key might well have spared us some of the more unpleasant sounds on offer. DF-D, by the way, gives us the "shining C major", but he’s a baritone and I wish he’d taken it down to B flat! Why do singers have to push their voices a notch above what is comfortable, especially in lieder which it is perfectly legitimate to transpose?

The unevenness of this Naxos series is making it very difficult to recommend it globally as a way of exploring Schubert lieder; a few have been very fine and worth any price, some have not been worth even the modest asking price, while this one is somewhere in the middle. Overall I feel the Hyperion series is more reliable and justifies the extra outlay if you can afford it.

Christopher Howell

see also review by Michael Cookson

 

For reviews of other releases in this series,
see the Naxos Deutsche Schubert-Lied Edition page

 

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