Of course, a lifetime, even so short a one as Schubert’s, does contain a great many days, and most of these compositions may well have been written in a single day: nevertheless, it is this, the sheer productivity, that must fill even the most casual listeners with the most immediate sense of wonder. And does that, perhaps, suggest that the intrinsic quality is less striking? There is just something in the thought, enough for a moment’s pause. Thomas Hardy wrote a poem starting “Any little old song will do for me”, and in a borrowed copy I found that its owner had pencilled “That’s just the hell of it!”. No ‘hell’ comes even remotely into view with the ‘little old songs’ that Schubert so tirelessly set for men’s voices, but some of them are, I would say, no more than pastime-songs, hearty or ‘comfy’ or sentimental (not necessarily in a pejorative sense), and several have too many verses. In these seven CDs everything is to be heard, because every next item may be a gem (as it often is); but, unlike a comparable collection of Schubert’s Lieder, a certain amount falls by the wayside.
The scheme of presentation here is both sensible and imaginative. Instead of a chronological ordering, or arrangement by musical category (pieces for unaccompanied male voices, piano-accompanied SATB and so forth), each of the discs has a subject-heading, “Transience” for the first, “Love” for the second. Under each of these will normally be found examples of the combinations most frequently employed. We come, for instance, to welcome those settings for women’s unaccompanied voices, starting with a verse in unison, adding then a second voice and a third: there is a lovely freshness about the sound of the unison, simple and artless (you say as a first reaction) but oddly, and hauntingly, suggestive of overtones and implied development. It is also remarkable how often the ear is deceived by the sonority of the male-voice part-songs: you’d swear to hearing four parts where there are only three, and even a two-part harmony has exciting resonance, as in Lutzows wilde Jagd.
Each disc has its share of the treasures. The first opens with the setting of Goethe’s Gesang der Geister uber den Wassern for men’s voices and string quartet (without violins), probably the supreme masterpiece of the whole collection. The fascinating contrapuntal treatment of Schiller’s Dreifach ist der Schritt der Zeit in its male-voice setting, and the gentle melancholy of Scott’s Coronach are also memorable. The love-songs on the second disc begin and end with the Standchen, “Zogernd leise”, its second version, with male-voice chorus, being so much the more attractive in these performances. Under the heading of “Eternity” (third disc) comes much that has perhaps a questionable place in a secular anthology: good to have, nevertheless, and good to be able to ‘place’ the anthem known to British choristers as Where Thou reignest as Schiksalslenker, blicke nieder, the text having nothing to do with “sun by day and moon by night”. The fourth disc has “Heroism” as its theme, with Mirjams Siegesgesang as its lengthiest work. “Nature” (fifth disc) produces several masterpieces, including Kleist’s Gott in der Natur and the magical Nachthelle. The sixth, devoted to “Celebration”, has some longer occasional pieces, none so delightful as the brief cantata written for his father’s birthday in 1813, with guitar accompaniment. The last disc, “Circle of Friends”, begins, beguilingly, with Der Tanz and ends with Zur guten Nacht.
The set is announced as the first complete edition on record of this important but widely undervalued portion of Schubert’s output. The nearest issue to having done so previously is a boxed set of five LPs from 1981 by the Bavarian Radio Chorus and Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch which has been reissued on four CDs (listed above). That contained 88 titles, compared with the present 130; even so, the selection was a good one and the standard of performance high. Sawallisch had a stronger team of soloists (Behrens, Fassbaender, Schreier, Fischer-Dieskau); Ortner’s do their work well but without comparable distinction. It is in the choral singing that the great merit of these performances lies. The Arnold Schoenberg Choir is a fine body of musicians; we have always known that, but in these recordings they show (as has not always been the case) a virtually unflawed beauty and opulence of tone. As against this, it comes as one of the few necessary criticisms that the voices are sometimes placed further back than one would wish in relation to the piano accompaniment. If that in turn requires a qualification, it derives from the excellence of the pianists, headed by Andras Schiff.'