★★★★★
This is easily the most searching and comprehensive account of Schubert's first great song-cycle that I have heard. Which is not to say that it is the most beautifully sung - that is Fritz Wunderlich; or the most agonised - that is Pears with Britten accompanying.
Kaufmann tells us in the booklet that he needed to record the cycle now, while his voice still sounds fairly youthful: he turned 40 last year, and already sounds more baritonal than he did when I first heard him sing it in...
- www.classical-music.com
2014-04-24
★★★★★
The career of the eternally ardent and fresh-voiced Fritz Wunderlich was tragically foreshortened by a fatal domestic accident. All the more reason to cherish this 1964 Schöne Müllerin . Hilary Finch
- www.classical-music.com
2014-04-24
★★★★★
Two new recordings, released within weeks, by top singers performing Schubert's great winter's journey song cycle should deter no one from buying both. No household can have too many. Buy it from Buy the CDSchubertWinterreiseGerald Finley, Julius Drake Hyperion2014 While Jonas Kaufmann's (Sony) is febrile, emphatic, close to melodrama, Gerald Finley's is inward, poised, heartbreaking in holding back...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-03-16
★★★★★
Bertrand Chamayou's new album is a bit of a puzzle. Though simply entitled "Schubert", it doesn't consist entirely of the genuine article, for starters: the Wanderer-Fantasie and the D946 Klavierstücke are the main works, but the accompanying smaller pieces include Liszt's transcriptions of some of the songs and Richard Strauss's version of the Kupelwieser Waltz, which Schubert never wrote down, but has been learned by ear by successive generations of pianists...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-03-14
★★★★★
I was so shocked by the dullness of Schubert's Sixth Symphony on this disc that as soon as I had listened to it I put on Thomas Beecham's recording from 1955, still sounding excellent. I was in a different world. The Sixth is no masterpiece whoever conducts it, in fact it seems to me the weakest of the Symphonies. Schubert is being ambitious in it: he aimed to learn from Beethoven in the brevity of the themes and their lengthy development, and from Rossini in the construction of climaxes...
- www.classical-music.com
2014-03-07
★★★★★
Jonas Kaufmann has sung enough Lieder in Britain now for us not to be surprised at how a tenor with such a thrillingly operatic voice, who seems to take every challenge he encounters in the opera house so comfortably in his stride, can scale down his sound to the intimate dimensions of a recital hall so convincingly...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-02-28
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDFranz SchubertSchubert: Der Wanderer [Florian Boesch, Roger Vignoles] [Hyperion: CDA68010]NoneHyperion2014 Florian Boesch and Roger Vignoles' new album examines ideas of wandering and travel as metaphors for existential isolation in Schubert's songs. The task they've set themselves isn't particularly easy...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-02-14
★★★★★
As they make clear in the sleeve notes, Gautier Capuçon and Frank Braley designed the programme on this disc as a tribute to Mstislav Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten, who made extraordinary recordings of these works together in the 1960s and early 70s. On their own terms, these performances are wonderfully achieved, too. Their account of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata is airy and buoyant, and they adopt a robust and rustic approach to Schumann's Five Pieces in Folk Style Op 102...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-12-13
★★★★★
Born in Germany in 1923, Menachem Pressler is best known as the pianist in the incomparable Beaux Arts Trio, which disbanded in 2008 after more than half a century. Pressler still teaches, and at the age of 89 recently resumed his solo career, somewhat curtailed by his chamber music making. He still has so much to offer, as this disc richly demonstrates. Schubert's Sonata in G major D.894 is played with an intimacy and unhurried eloquence which befits Pressler's distinctive, ego-free style...
- www.theguardian.com
2013-10-20
Loading...
