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

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

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

Like the paintings of the Flemish Baroque painters, the ‘vanities’ presented here can be approached in two ways: on the one hand, as manifestations of doubts and anxieties at the fragility of human life; on the other, as delights to be savoured without moderation, celebrating earthly life through the senses and the pleasure that human beings can derive from them. After two critically acclaimed recordings each for Alpha, the baritone Georg Nigl and the pianist Olga Pashchenko explore the tortuous meanders of the human soul with vocal works by Schubert (an ‘existentialist’ composer if ever there was one), Beethoven (whose torments hardly need stressing) and the contemporary composer Wolfgang Rihm, whose highly expressionistic Jakob Lenz Nigl performed on stage in 2019. His piece Vermischter Traum, here given its world premiere, is dedicated to the Austrian singer. © Alpha Classics

This 2022 release of Schubert's Schwanengesang, D. 957 ("Swan Song"), which pianist Lars Vogt did not live to see, is one of the pianist's swan songs, and it makes a fitting memorial. This may be one of the factors that propelled the album onto classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2022, but the album has intrinsic merits on which it can rest. Vogt delivers an exceptional performance as an accompanist in these pieces, which do not form a true song cycle (they were compiled by a published after Schubert's untimely death), but which point to directions Schubert would have explored had he lived and in some cases look deep into the future. To an unusual degree, they emancipate the accompaniment from the melody line, and Vogt's way of setting a whole scene with the introductions is uncanny. Sample the murky opening of Der Doppelgänger for an idea, or the famed Ständchen, which has a unique flavor here. As for the star of the show, tenor Ian Bostridge, those more comfortable with a baritone in these songs may be pleased to note a new richness in his lower register as he approaches his sixth decade, compared with the last time he recorded these songs in 2009. Otherwise, this is trademark Bostridge, with flexible lines tending toward an operatic approach, clear diction, and controlled emotion. One could argue that Vogt made an ideal foil for his style. Another draw is the presence of Einsamkeit, D. 620, a set of connected songs that shows Schubert responding directly to Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98. The real star here though, perhaps, is Vogt, and it is good to have this release to remember him.© James Manheim /TiVo

Vladimir Martynov, born in 1946, is one of the cohort of composers that includes Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli, and Valentin Silvestrov, who grew up under the influence of the former Soviet Union and abandoned the modernism of their youth to embrace a tonal language of greater simplicity with an aesthetic informed by an intimate spirituality. In spite of the similarities in their backgrounds and journeys, each has a distinctive sound, and Martynov, who is perhaps the least well-known in the West, brings a new perspective to the tradition of European music shaped by mysticism and minimalism. On the surface Martynov's music doesn't have an immediate resemblance to minimalism (apart from the directness of its tonal language), but like minimalism it uses repetition as a structural element and it is concerned with the perception of the passage of time, which it tends to stretch out with almost unbearable poignancy into what commentator Greg Dubinsky describes as "a prolonged state of grace." His harmonic vocabulary is characterized by the fecund tonal richness of post-Romanticism without the angst or decadence sometimes associated with the music of that era. The two composers Martynov references in the pieces recorded here are Schubert and Mahler, both of whom had immense expressive range but were especially noted for the pure, unsentimental sweetness they could summon. Der Abschied (The Farewell), written in memory of the composer's father, draws on material from Das Lied von der Erde. It opens with a bleak, sinking desolation, but over the course of its 40 minutes the music blossoms into an unabashed hyper-Romanticism of unguarded expressiveness and intense sweetness. Martynov wrote his Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished) for the current members of the Kronos plus Joan Jeanrenaud, the group's original cellist. Its two movements take as their core material the rising octave figure of Schubert's great C major Quintet, and the composer interweaves other themes from the Schubert throughout. Martynov originally wrote The Beatitudes for chorus, but arranged it especially for Kronos. The performances are wrenchingly heartfelt, steeped more in the kind of old-school Romanticism of groups like the Budapest Quartet than is typical for Kronos, but the approach is utterly appropriate for the music. Nonesuch's sound is clean, warmly immediate, and vibrant. Martynov could provide an ideal entryway into contemporary music for listeners open to new works and new ideas, but who tend to be shy of dissonance. Highly recommended.© TiVo

His debut recording devoted to Schumann offered a brilliant opportunity to discover the name of Samuel Hasselhorn, a young baritone deeply invested in the art of lieder. With his collaborator Joseph Middleton, he now turns to Schubert, in an insightful programme evoking some of the themes dear to the Viennese master of song: nature, night-time, parting, absence, and death. Both essential and less familiar songs are featured side by side in this poignant depiction of profound self-reflection that can rank among the most moving examples of what the Romantic temperament has ever produced. © harmonia mundi

While not all of the 17 Schubert songs collected here under the title Abendbilder (Evening Images) deal specifically with the evening, most are at least tinged with the melancholy that's associated with the end of the day in the romantic imagination, and baritone Christian Gerhaher's passionate sensibility brings that melancholy to the fore. Gerhaher's voice has matured since his fine 2001 recording of Der Winterreise and his interpretive skills have deepened. He is becoming a master of an effortless, creamy legato that's especially evident in the long floating lines of "Du bist die Ruh." The way Gerhaher's voice materializes out of nothing in "Im Abendrot" is magical, and the simplicity and directness of his singing is heartbreakingly poignant. He is at much at home in the more energetic and vociferous songs, such as "Bei dir allein," "Auf der Bruck," and "Der Musensohn," but it's in the more introspective pieces, where he can caress the words, that he is most unaffectedly moving. Gerold Huber provides supple and nuanced accompaniment, and the partnership of voice and piano is one of the album's greatest strengths. The sound is warm, present, and well balanced, with just enough resonance to maximize Gerhaher's ringing tone.© TiVo