It grieves me to report that what may well be the last new recording by Fassbaender, because of her retirement, is far from being a success, hardly on a par with her admired accounts of the later cycles. In a personal note accompanying the disc she admits she hasn't the ''gift of tenorish naivety'' this cycle calls for, and it is certainly hard to accept her vibrant, often driven mezzo as the right voice to impersonate the shy, sensitive youth. Although she writes that the exploration of masculine emotions can become ''an intellectual adventure'', I find her particular brand of Angst-ridden delivery, so appropriate elsewhere, too portentous for this cycle.
Too many punchy emphases and a failure to provide the necessary delicacy in dynamic contrasts, so essential here, add to the sense of an overweight, somewhat blowzy reading, unfortunately underlined by an unsympathetic recording, over-reverberant, lacking intimacy and allowing the voice to blare and the piano to sound loud and hard. That fault only spotlights Reimann's heavy-handed playing. Of course with such a discerning artist as Fassbaender, there are compensations, particularly in a finely articulated ''Ungeduld'', all the better for being sung at a slower tempo than usual, and in her projection of fury in the two songs when the protagonist first becomes aware of the huntsman's presence.
Fassbaender adds interest to her interpretation by reading Muller's quizzical prologue and epilogue to the cycle, and the three poems that Schubert declined to set. One wonders why he left out ''Erster Schmerz, letzter Scherz'', which seems to fit in so well with the mood of the rest. She speaks all these with a nice blend of objective observation (prologue and epilogue) and subjective feeling (the three poems), but again her efforts are subverted by the unflattering sound, not at all in the best DG traditions. R1 '9507129'