Singing the Many Songs of Schubert (600-Plus)

A heartening aspect of today’s otherwise dim art-song picture--as the live performance of Lieder becomes increasingly restricted to European music festivals--is the ongoing recording of all 600-plus Schubert songs by the British Hyperion label, under the enlightened supervision of Graham Johnson, who is also the pianist and annotator throughout.

The project reaches midpoint with volumes 17 and 18, entrusted to a pair of veterans with impeccable interpretive credentials and remarkably well-preserved voices: soprano Lucia Popp (33017) and tenor Peter Schreier (33018), 54 and 58 years old respectively.

As in the preceding releases of the series, each of these additions is thematically arranged, Popp’s offering songs from 1816, Schubert’s 19th year, Schreier’s to career-spanning strophic songs. Both mix the familiar with the far more numerous unfamiliar.

The Popp group includes the well-known, killingly poignant “Litanei,” an ultimate test of a singer’s ability to sustain long legato phrases, which she delivers with exquisite fluency.

Among the rarities are a trio of gorgeous seasonal songs, “Herbstabend,” “’Fruhlingslied” and “Winterlied,” their pedestrian lyrics elevated to high art by Schubert’s settings.

Prominent in the Schreier program are poems of Ernst Schulze, a minor poet whose verse Schubert found particularly inspiring, resulting in such marvels as “Drang in die Ferne,” a young man’s wrenching farewell to his parents; “Auf der Bruck,” that most fiercely joyous of Schubert’s galloping songs, and the celebrated “Im Fruhling,” dark thoughts on the transitoriness of life, in the guise of a rustic idyll.

Popp and Schreier both possess the true recitalist’s ability to create dramatic microcosms. They are not formula singers, content to repeat a series of vocal or verbal devices to compensate for a failure to treat the songs as entities.

These words aren’t intended as sticks with which to beat that most prolific of Lied specialists, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. But it’s difficult to overlook his cavalier way with what he may regard as trivial texts while listening to his 1977 Salzburg Festival Schubert recital (Orfeo 334 91), a collaboration with Sviatoslav Richter, whose sight-reading can at times penetrate to the music’s core more readily than many another pianist’s years of study.

Still, while there’s vast intelligence and skill on display here, many songs are skated over, with Fischer-Dieskau resorting to his familiar croon-and-bark style to keep the audience happy and, perhaps, himself engaged.

Which is hardly to say that this is a program to be dismissed. There are revelations, too, where one feels the artists are making momentous discoveries for themselves, such as “Des Sangers Habe,” dealing with the singer’s most precocious possession, his songs; the fragile “Abendbilder,” in which Richter’s projection of an astonishing range of soft tone inspires Fischer-Dieskau to the sort of profoundly atmospheric singing that made his reputation in the 1950s.

Two notable reissues: The first of Hans Hotter’s four commercial recordings of Schubert’s vast “Winterreise” cycle, dating from 1942 (Deutsche Grammophon 437 351, mid-price), shows this great artist in his vocal prime, if not yet as the communicative tragic actor of later years. The accommodating pianist is Michael Raucheisen.

Deutsche Grammophon pays tribute, too, to one of its most productive artists of the postwar years, the late Irmgard Seefried, with its treasurable compilation of song recordings from the years 1953-1962 (437 348, two mid-priced CDs).

Included are many of Mozart’s most familiar songs; eight Schubert standards; two cycles, Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und Leben” and Mussorgsky’s “Nursery,” as well as Bartok’s marvelous “Village Scenes” and works by Brahms, Wolf and Richard Strauss.

All show Seefried in peak form, delivering the music with her slightly edgy soprano, eager, pointed verbal delivery and the rhythmic acuteness that differentiated her work from the more crowd-pleasingly theatrical efforts of her contemporary and frequent colleague, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.