One might react to this album with initial annoyance and ask whether it is really necessary to hear orchestrated versions of Schubert's supremely pianistic songs. It may come as a surprise, then, to find that most of these Lieder with Orchestra were arranged by great composers. They include Benjamin Britten, Jacques Offenbach, and Max Reger, who took on the job because, he said, he hated to hear a piano-accompanied song on an orchestral program. Perhaps the most surprising name to find is that of Anton Webern, but his arrangements are not the minimal, pointillistic things one might expect; he wrote these arrangements as a way of studying Schubert's music, and they are quite straightforward. Indeed, it is somewhat difficult to distinguish the arrangers simply by listening to the music; Schubert's melodic lines tend to suggest distinctive solutions. Perhaps Reger's are a bit more lush than the others, although his version of Erlkönig, D. 328, is one of the few numbers here that just doesn't work (there is no way to replicate the percussive quality of the accompaniment). As for the performances as such, Benjamin Appl is clearly an important rising baritone, and he has a wonderful natural quality in Schubert. An oddball release like this might seem an unusual choice for a singer in early career, but he contributes his own notes, and he seems to have undertaken the project out of genuine enthusiasm for the material. At the very least, he has brought some intriguing pieces out of the archives and given them highly listenable performances. The Munich Radio Orchestra, under the young Oscar Jockel, is suitably restrained and keeps out of Appl's way. This release made classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo

Schubert was known in his time primarily as a composer of songs, but he was also a master of the dance form and wrote prolifically for a middle-class society eager for domestic entertainment. He loved ländler (triple-time country dances), the "Écossaises" (supposedly Scottish), and the rich variety of genial German dances. Viennese pianos of the day produced a sound that was clear and transparent, very different from modern instruments, and in this recording Yang Liu plays on a Steinway grand and a copy of a mid-1820s fortepiano by Conrad Graf, a maker well known to Schubert. © Naxos

At ninety-five years old, Herbert Blomstedt still seems to be in his prime. Just last year, in November 2021, he recorded Schubert’s last two symphonies at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. For his “debut” under the Deutsche Grammophon label, the Swedish conductor had originally chosen to rehearse and record both works in public, but the coronavirus epidemic had other ideas. The rehearsals and subsequent recording eventually took place behind closed doors.Blomstedt knows this prestigious German orchestra well, having conducted it from 1998 to 2005. In fact, he remains its conductor emeritus. This new recording serves as a life lesson as well as a music lesson, putting a whole new spin on Schubert’s melancholy. A luminous message of hope takes hold from the very first measures of “Unfinished” Symphony, which features a supple and lively tempo and is completely free of the morosity that most composers tend to imbue into this work.A sense of eternal youth dominates the entire performance of the great Symphony in C major, whose repetitions and lengthy developments are overlooked thanks to the weightless, lively tempos. Every section of the ensemble brings incredible life to the piece, especially the solo oboe in the wonderful Andante con Moto (which seems to take the form of a simple ländler under the artistic eye of this talented conductor). A bouncy Scherzo leads into an explosive Allegro vivace that oozes pure joy. The Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra are truly at their best here, capturing every nuance and reaching every sudden crescendo Schubert intended. The harmonies are dazzling, the brass section is nothing if not divine and the string section possesses the uncanny ability to alternate between soft, silky sounds and unbridled power. Schubert would be proud of this work. © François Hudry/Qobuz

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All Baroque roads lead to Romanticism, and Jordi Savall knows this all too well. His rendition of the Beethoven Symphonies revisits the original manuscripts, dynamics, tempos and instruments, and Savall enacts this same approach with Franz Schubert, who died a few months after the great German composer. With this recording, made in September 2021 in the collegiate church of Cardona in Catalonia, the valiant octogenarian brings his own spiritual vision to Schubert. This is further affirmed by the album’s title: Transfiguration.The Catalan violinist is, above all, a humanist and a lyricist, two qualities that resonate particularly well with the music and spirit of Franz. Savall graces us with a vision of the Unfinished Symphony that contemplates the infinite without ever feeling heavy, instead turning towards the inner light.Music served as a vessel for Schubert, an outlet for his existential pain. Throughout his work, which culminates in the Ninth Symphony in C major, the Viennese composer expresses his aspiration for a youth freed from the inexorable presence of illness. This zest for life finds a particular resonance here in Jordi Savall’s poignant vision of the last two symphonies. Savall provides much more than just another version, creating an interpretation that penetrates deep into the depths of Schubert's distress, whilst still maintaining the lively desire for brotherhood that also fills the composer's great creations. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Nightfall is undoubtedly one of the most personal and intimate moments of our daily lives. We return home to our loved ones, slowly transitioning from the hubbub of the outside world to the silence of the evening. It’s to this unique time of day that Elīna Garanča wanted to dedicate her album When Night Falls…she invites us on a musical journey to the planet’s different countries and time zones.The mezzo-soprano of Latvian origin isn’t known solely for her unique timbre; her voice, warm and brimming with infinite strength, has proven itself for over 30 years in all of the greatest opera houses across the world . Elīna Garanča also speaks six languages fluently: along with Latvian, she speaks German, English, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, almost all of which are used on When Night Falls…for the first time, this album carves out a special place for her mother tongue, which Elīna Garanča justifies outright in an interview with Qobuz: “It’s been a long time coming for Latvian music to be heard, don’t you think?” Alongside lieder by composer Raimonds Pauls, living legend in Latvia and friend of the singer, we also find writings by Aspazija, “our national female poet,” set to music. Latvian repertoire is all the more present on this album for the vivid childhood memories the singer has kept of the familiar sounds that she heard in the evenings, and the songs that were sung to her to lull her to sleep. Yet given the subject at hand, how could we forget the great romantics? The album opens with Strauss’s “Wiegenlied (Lullaby),” followed by lieder by Brahms, Schubert, and Humperdinck. Elīna Garanča also dedicates a significant part of the album to Spanish and Italian repertoire, most notably by contemporary composers such as Manuel de Falla, Xavier Montsalvatge, and Luciano Berio. With virtuosity and a lovely diversity in timbre, with each shift in style, the singer achieves a true musical metamorphosis, backed by the formidable Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria, conducted by Karel Mark Chichon – her real-life spouse. “Each of my albums is a reflection of my internal state,” explains the soprano. Here, the withdrawal into a more intimate sphere – particularly in the uncertain times in which we live today – is incarnated by music that holds us tight, offering us a glimmer of hope within the darkness. © Lena Germann/Qobuz

This 2023 release inaugurates an ongoing series from baritone Samuel Hasselhorn and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz, performing Schubert works two centuries on from their date of composition, and slated to culminate in 2028, the bicentennial of the composer's death. The project begins with one of the most famous Schubert song cycles of all, Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795, depicting the crackup and despair of a young wanderer who falls in love with a beautiful miller's daughter. Hasselhorn has plenty of recent competition in this cycle; listeners can sample the 2017 recording by Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber for another approach, but this one promises well for the ongoing project. Die schöne Müllerin is a work in which Schubert took vast strides toward the emancipation of the piano in the lied, and Bushakevitz leans into this aspect, with details that illuminate and often foreshadow themes developing in the text. Hasselhorn has a warm baritone with an appealing conversational tone that turns chilly and quiet toward the cycle's downer conclusion. Another draw is Harmonia Mundi's sound from the b-sharp studio in Berlin; the engineers put Bushakevitz just a bit forward in the mix, not so much as to sap energy from Hasselhorn's singing, but enough to highlight his perceptive performance. This release bodes well indeed for the duo's future work.© James Manheim /TiVo

After receiving huge praise for his debut album on Deutsche Grammophon, baritone Andrè Schuen continues his Schubert journey. Schubert's enigmatic final collection of songs, Schwanengesang, is the subject of Andrè Schuen and his longstanding accompanist Daniel Heide's second release for Deutsche Grammophon. Schuen calls Schwanengesang "my greatest love among the Schubert lieder. Especially the Heine settings; they move me the most!". © Deutsche Grammophon

Here are two works composed by Schubert at the very end of his short life. Schwanengesang (Swansong) was written in Vienna in the autumn of 1828. He died on 19 November at the age of thirty-one, and Die Taubenpost (Pigeon post), which closes the collection, is said to be his very last composition. The fourteen songs, by turns light-hearted, sombre and melancholy, are settings of poems by Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gabriel Seidl. In the summer of the same year he composed his String Quintet in C major, scored for two cellos, which was not premiered until 1850, at the Vienna Musikverein. The power and orchestral dimensions of the work make it a pinnacle of nineteenth-century chamber music. We could not have dreamt of a finer line-up of musicians to record these two Schubert monuments. Fanny Mendelssohn’s Schwanenlied (also to words by Heinrich Heine) completes the programme, along with Felix Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words No. 1 (for solo piano), composed a year after Schubert’s death and Schubert’s own setting of an unrelated Schwanengesang (D. 744, on a poem by Johann Senn). © Alpha Classics

This release by tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Mitsuko Uchida, Schubert specialists both, came with strong recital buzz on both sides of the Atlantic and landed on classical best-seller charts in early 2023. This recording was made at Wigmore Hall in London. It is Schubert's not-quite-cycle Schwanengesang (it was assembled into a set after Schubert's death) that gets top billing in the graphics, but the album opens with Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98, the first true song cycle, shown on the cover in small print. The piano part in Beethoven's songs had an unprecedentedly major role in the proceedings, and the placement of the set at the beginning may serve to advise the listener of the unusual emphasis on Uchida's piano in the main Schubert attraction as well. Sample Ständchen, the most famous song in the set, or Abschied for a taste of the lively, spritely quality that is Uchida's alone. The piano-driven effect is heightened by the engineering, which puts Padmore's voice somewhat into the background, and it is not at all clear that this needed to be done. Padmore remains, however, a terrific Schubert interpreter. His voice is a bit thin in its middle register by now, but his ability to extract fine shades of meaning through slight alterations of tempo is unmatched. In general, this is a fine Schubert recording that lives up to the hype, and it is especially recommended to Uchida fans; they will discover a new facet of her talent. © James Manheim /TiVo

René Jacobs and the B’Rock Orchestra complete their Schubert cycle on Pentatone with the composer’s two most famous symphonies, the "Unfinished" and "Great". In his extensive liner notes, Jacobs develops a theory that the B Minor Symphony did not remain “unfinished”, but was deliberately left unfinished, because Schubert shaped its two movements in analogy to Mein Traum ("My Dream"), an autobiographical narration in two parts, written in 1822, simultaneous to the creation of the symphony. While the first half of Mein Traum tells about his mother’s decease and his problematic relationship to his father, the second part enters a magical, Romantic realm, and eventually brings a reconciliation with his father. On this recording, the two parts of the narration precede the two movements of the "Unfinished" Symphony, and are recited by Tobias Moretti. Jacobs argues that, after the dream-inspired "Unfinished", the "Great" C Major Symphony, with its solemn character and sublime dimensions, served as a liberation for Schubert. Presenting these contrasting works forms a fitting apotheosis to a cycle that has been designed from the onset as a series of symphonic pairs. The players of the B’Rock Orchestra present these works on period instruments; transparent, but full of fire. © Pentatone

World famous mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and conductor-pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin join forces to take on one of the most brilliant song cycles ever written: Schubert's Winterreise. DiDonato, however, casts a different light on this beloved cycle of 24 songs in telling their story from the perspective of the woman, the lost love. Nancy Plum, from Town Topics (Princeton) writes: "The question of what happened to the woman who sent the narrator on a tortuous journey was not answered in the Wilhelm Müller poetry from which Schubert drew the text, but DiDonato created a scenario onstage of being that woman, reading from the narrator's journal and responding to the inherent despair". "What stood out was the heavy emotion that came through in her singing, as she lingered on a syllable here, pressed her tone there. She created vivid feelings with her contrasts", wrote The New York Classical Review about Joyce Didonato's interpretation. © Warner Classics