Christoph Prégardien, Graham Johnson - Schubert: Complete Songs, Vol. 23 (1994)

When the Hyperion Schubert Edition is completed, this latest wondrous offering will rank among its most precious jewels. Prégardien is a prince among tenor interpreters of Lieder at present, on a par with Blochwitz in instinctive, natural and inevitably phrased readings. Johnson, besides finding exactly the right performers for these songs, surpasses even his own high standard of playing in this series. Then there's Schubert himself, the Schubert of 1816 by and large, who was, Johnson tentatively suggests in his notes, going through a phase of 'bringing himself under control'. That means, largely but far from entirely, writing gently lyrical strophic songs, most of them of ineffable beauty and simplicity, starkly contrasting with the Harfenspieler settings from Wilhelm Meister, two of which were written in 1816, the other in 1822.
In such an outright masterpiece as DerJüngling an der Quelle, Prégardien and Johnson confirm the latter's view that this piece 'makes time stand still'. They emphasise, in Stimme derLiebe, how Schubert uses shifting harmonies to indicate romantic obsession. They show in the two similar but subtly different versions of DerLeidende ('The suffering one') what Johnson calls 'two sides of the same coin', with the tenor's plangent, tender singing, line and text held in perfect balance. The two Hölty songs that follow, Die frühe Liebe and Die Knabenzeit, evince a wonderful affinity with thoughts of childhood on the part of poet and composer, again ideally captured here. So is the 'chaste and wistful' mood of Klopstock's Edone. The recording is ideally balanced.