The Naxos label's complete Schubert edition has featured some strong performers, but its real virtue has been the group of insights that emerge from the groupings of songs that many of the individual albums have brought together. This release features "part-songs," for SATB voices with piano accompaniment. For Schubert this medium did not connote any kind of light tone, and in fact most of the texts here are religious or spiritual in their embrace of nature. The program is absorbing from start to finish. Schubert was obviously writing for skilled singers who could handle extremes of range and some pretty complex modulations. Most interesting of all is the chance to observe Schubert's interaction with the various poets who furnished these texts, ranging, as usual with the composer, from the famous (
Schiller) to the obscure (Johann Peter Uz). The free-verse proto-Romanticism of Friedrich Klopstock calls forth from Schubert a sort of hyper-dramatic language, while elsewhere he uses sober chordal textures and even polyphony. The songs are not performed by the same quartet all the way through, but pianist
Ulrich Eisenlohr maintains a consistent sound, and sopranos
Sibylla Rubens and Silke Schwarz deserve special mention for confident intonation while quietly singing at the very top of their range. The texts are given only online, in German and English, less than desirable but understandable here in view of the length of some of them. Highly recommended, either as part of the ongoing series or as an introduction to a fascinating and still-neglected part of Schubert's output.