The ongoing giant project on the part of the Naxos label to record all of
Schubert's songs is based on a classification scheme originally suggested by
Schubert himself in a private publication of some of his songs: he grouped them by poet. The specific reaction of
Schubert to
Goethe's poetry has provided fertile ground for singers' interpretations for years, and the Naxos series has revealed a host of similar possibilities with other poets and genres, even if those possibilites have not always been exploited by the performers involved. The concept is perhaps at its weakest in catchall categories like the "Austrian Contemporaries" of the present disc and its two companions, for the poems
Schubert sets (reproduced not in the booklet but on a website containing an Adobe Acrobat file, in German and English) have little in common beyond chronological contiguity with
Schubert's own career. The plus side is that the album resurrects some of the rarer
Schubert songs -- rarer precisely because the poets are today so little known -- and finds some real gems. Consider the ambitious freedom of structure in the Frühlingslied, D. 919 (Spring Song), which despite its clear harmonies points deep into the future in its treatment of text, not really arioso but organic. The program often seems to alternate between the jolly
Schubert of German singing clubs and the radical visionary who devised the whole language of Romanticism without anybody ever figuring out what he was up to until he was gone. Another pleasure is the rich mezzo soprano of
Daniela Sindram, who seems involved with the texts and articulates them clearly. Pianist
Ulrich Eisenlohr, the artistic director of the series, has several nice chances to shine here (sample the remarkable Beethovenian opening of Blondel zu Marien, D. 626, on track 12), and in general, as usual, he shows a good sense of when to take an activist role with the piano and when to back off. The Naxos series as a whole may be for hardcore
Schubert fanatics, but its structure also allows listeners to use the individual discs to fill holes in their collections -- a purpose for which this disc is well suited.