I find it hard to express the joy engendered by this recital. Upshaw and Goode are a musical marriage made in heaven, each a highly individual, probing and sincere artist prepared to challenge received views on a song. Thus their Gretchen am Spinnrade in this programme of all-Goethe settings is an outburst of a desperate and infinitely perturbed woman breaking conventional bonds. To emphasize the point Upshaw leans into the first syllable of ''nimmer'' at each repetition with added feeling and times the climax of the great song at the word ''Kuss'' in an overwhelming way, only such a similarly involving (although very different) interpreter as Lotte Lehmann could. Goode's playing simply underlines and reinforces the singer's intense utterance.
Two songs later, in the equally memorable Suleika, the pair show that they are just as alert to a very different mood, the erotic thoughts of the eponymous woman as she contemplates the message of her beloved. For this Upshaw brings a smile into her tone and sings off the words—as she does throughout—with a confident freedom seconded by Goode's light-fingered, gentle accompaniment rising to a stirring climax at ''Dort, dort …''. You might find the soprano's Achilles' Heel in the intervening song, Wanderers Nachtlied: here in a piece calling for full, even tone Upshaw isn't either steady or warm enough, but even here the essence of the song's inner meaning is conveyed, and in An den Mond we hear the pair finding yet another 'voice' for the protagonist's subtle thoughts.
I must be briefer about the other two groups. The Schumann settings are filled with just as much spontaneous emotion and direct imagination as the Schubert. The pair make as strong a case as possible for Schumann's setting of Mignon's Kennst du das Land being superior even to Wolf's, the repeated ''Kennst du das wohl?'' carrying an extraordinary charge. They put us further in their debt by including this composer's Wanderers Nachtlied, a lesser setting than Schubert's but worth hearing once in a while. The singer's voice is ideally fitted for Wolf's teasingly sensual Die Sprode and Die Bekehrte and the pair bring the lightest touch to Blumengruss. Finally they give Mozart's Das Veilchen a deeper meaning than almost any interpreters I have heard from the past.
An ideally balanced, forward yet spacious recording enhances the pleasure to be derived from this deeply satisfying disc. Oh yes! One further pleasure: the singer brings off the close of Schubert's Ganymed with a controlled and long-breathed approach to its visionary close after gradually building the song as a single statement of an esctatic state—marvellous.'