So soon after Philips's reminder of Wunderlich's work in the field of Lieder (see page 1191), here comes the much-lamented tenor's 1966 account of Schubert's first cycle. It first appeared posthumously almost immediately after Wunderlich's untimely death in 1966. Indeed, I heard him sing the cycle at the Edinburgh Festival that year only weeks before his fatal accident, I recall then admiring as ever the sheer warmth and ease of the singing while being disappointed with the interpretation. My feelings have always been much the same as regards this recording made about the same time. With little or no help from his unimaginative pianist (who was, it has to be said, something of a mentor to Wunderlich), the singer fails to suggest either the anticipatory eagerness and ardour of the opening songs or the heartbreak and sorrow of the later ones, the emotional temperature is kept at too even a level throughout, and Wunderlich fails to vary his dynamics and expression the way Protschka, for instance, does in his recent Capriccio/Target version. The phrasing is too often too slack.
Having made those strictures, I must add that there is a special frisson to be enjoyed in hearing such a sappy, sheerly sensuous voice in Schubert something to be admired on its own account. Has anyone, for instance, sung ''Ungeduld'' with such freshness, or uttered the anger of the jealous outbursts with such overt passion? Maybe Gedda in a strangely neglected reading on Electrola from the 1970s, never issued here; no one else in my experience.
If you like to hear your Schubert sung in a quite unvarnished way, you will enjoy much else here just as I did even if this is not up among the most valued interpretations of the cycle. The same points, for and against, apply to the three extra songs on this well filled and brightly recorded disc.'