Schubert: Schwanengesang; 4 Lieder (Great Recordings of the

Schubert: Schwanengesang; 4 Lieder (Great Recordings of the Century)

There is more to being a great composer than just a purely musical gift, as Shaw said more than once, and there is more to these songs than just divine melody. However when all's said and done the musical gift is the basis of it all, and Schubert's purely musical endowment was, in my own view, the greatest that any human being ever had. Brahms had a word for it again, in a letter where he asks rhetorically `Does any composer so consistently scale the heights?' As with Mozart, there is a numinous quality to Schubert - we often seem to be in the presence of someone or something using the composer as a mouthpiece, but who or what this agency might have been we are left to wonder. On Schubert's tombstone it says that music has here buried a great treasure and still greater hopes. He would surely have achieved things completely unthinkable if he had lived. There are a few welcome extras here too. Moore was probably not the most proficient technician among accompanists, but his handling of the piano part in the Erlking, in its special way one of the hardest things in the entire literature of the piano, is a thing to remember. In one of his books he explains in detail the various expedients and shifts that he resorted to, but what puts his handling of it in a class of its own for me is first of all the pace he adopts, and secondly the sublime way in which he lets the tension relax without losing speed as he sets the scene for the Erlking's first song. I have heard those fiendish triplets given more evenly, but never quite the sense of drumming hooves conveyed so well, with four good marked beats to the bar and not too fast - the real sense of panic needs to be reserved for the end. Once again Fischer-Dieskau rises above the competition by the sheer sinister, evil beauty of his tone as the Erlking, with no cheap effects - Goethe's Erlking makes pretty speeches and Schubert's Erlking sings pretty tunes with no pantomime cackling.
Country USA
Manufacturer EMI Classics
Binding Audio CD
ReleaseDate 2001-04-10
UnitCount 1
Format Original recording remastered
UPCs 724356755925
EANs 0724356755925

Country	USA
Manufacturer	EMI Classics
Binding	Audio CD
ReleaseDate	2001-04-10
UnitCount	1
Format	Original recording remastered
UPCs	724356755925
EANs	0724356755925

Schubert: Schwanengesang; 4 Lieder (Great Recordings of the Century)

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