Modified rapture is my response to this new addition to the Hyperion Schubert edition. Make no mistake, the rapture is unbounded where the dramatic songs are concerned, the modification comes only in respect of the quieter, more intimate pieces for reasons that I shall later make clear. But first let me salute the undoubted successes of the issue, chief among them the discovery (for me)—there's always one such on each disc of this absorbing series—of Der Ungluckliche, a powerful scena of sorrow and lost happiness, offering a great range of feeling, not least in the remembrance of joy past. Every aspect of it is explored by Price and Johnson. I hear none of the false rhetoric on which some commentators have remarked, sharing Johnson's proper enthusiam (his note here is another masterpiece of detailed description). The more epigrammatic and contained Klage, a Holty setting, is no less impressively performed. Then Price attains what Johnson calles the ''lofty and sublime'' mood of An die Sonne, with its prefiguration of late Beethoven. Haydn is brought to mind in the formality of the next song, Der Morgenkuss. Gondelfahrer has been made famous in recent years by Janet Baker and others: Price likewise catches its air of strange mystery.
With the next song some doubts began to enter my mind. Johnson offers a hostage to fortune when he states of Der Winterabend that it has been written off because of slow and self-indulgent readings. Well, here I compared these interpreters with Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore. By the side of their seniors Price and Johnson sound somewhat stodgy and anonymous—at a decidedly slower tempo. This impression is underlined by the respective modes of recording. Unfortunately Hyperion seems to have relapsed into a too-recessed, churchy acoustic. Fischer-Dieskau and Moore sound more present, more intimate—the difference is quite startling, not least because Hyperion places the pianist too far away in relation to the singer.
On the whole, I have deliberately avoided listening to the complete DG set when dealing with the Hyperion because the DG has been unavailable: with its re-appearance on CD, it must now be taken into serious consideration. Another direct comparison, in Am Fenster, disclosed an arresting difference in length—the Hyperion pair take 4'41'', the DG partnership only 3'10''. At the slower speed the song outstays its welcome, the reading is too portentous; in the experienced hands of Fischer-Dieskau and Moore, with their attention to shades of colour and meaning, it appears the great Lied of Johnson's imagining! In parenthesis, I might add that Schreier and Schiff take a middle course in terms of tempo and interpretation (Decca (CD) 426 612-2DH, 6/90) and further convince me that this is a male song (the nostalgic musings of an old man, as John Reed suggests). Contrarily, in the familiar Der Wanderer an den Mond, the new pair are a shade too jaunty, too quick beside Fischer-Dieskau and Moore, and again a man proves preferable here.
With Die junge Nonne, at the end of the recital, Price is once more in her element. She and Johnson capture the essence of this superb masterpiece, one that never stales however many times it has been encountered. Margaret Price's tone, though perhaps showing a sign here and there of wear and tear, still rings out richly and tensely in the woman's stormy remembrances, her operatic experience here and elsewhere self-evident.'