Most of the material on this volume is not first-rate Schubert, but the performances certainly are; indeed, they’re superb, by and large. Gerald Finley and Juliane Banse, latecomers to the project, are both highly intelligent interpreters of Lieder, and few non-German/Austrian singers in my experience have more idiomatic German than Finley (as he has already shown in Volume 34). At the start of the recital he and Graham Johnson just about manage to convince us that a series of off-peak songs are worth reviving. Then he gives a wonderfully fluent and confident account of the three arias Schubert wrote for the noted bass, Lablache (Finley is as accomplished in Italian as in German). But he is at his very best in the one undeniably great Lied assigned to him, Der Kreuzzug, the most worthwhile of the Leitner settings of 1827 (the whole CD is devoted to pieces composed that year). His mellow, perfectly produced baritone, reminiscent of the young Hotter’s, is absolutely right for this moving, hymn-like meditation of a monk as he observes a departing company of crusaders.
Banse is given the similar (in mood) Das Weinen, another Leitner song, to which she brings just the right simple Innigkeit. She then tackles two fine songs that I closely associate with other singers. She doesn’t seem quite as outgoing as Janet Baker used to be in Heimliches Lieben, nor as spontaneous in her wonder as Fischer-Dieskau in Die Sterne, one of the truly great songs, but putting aside such possibly unfair comparisons, her brand of soft-grained intimacy is its own justification.
Der Hochzeitsbraten, a charming, 11-minute jeu d’esprit full of sexual innuendo that might almost come from a Mozart opera, is delightfully done, with real panache and smiles all round (and at the end a bit of yodelling) by Lynne Dawson, Michael Schade (a bit dry-toned elsewhere), Finley and Johnson, who has his work cut out to keep up with his singers. A unique occurrence in Schubert’s opus, and a delight. A slighter, jolly quartet completes this, the series’ penultimate CD, an undoubted success despite some inferior songs.'