“Hidden Treasure” is the appropriate subtitle for this volume of the complete Schiotz recordings. It begins with the ten songs from what ought to have been a complete Schone Mullerin, two songs recorded in London in 1939, eight with Hermann D. Koppel, who took over from Moore, in Denmark in 1939-40. The cycle was never finished, because – it seems – Koppel as a Jew had to flee his country when the Nazis occupied it. We had to wait until after the war for the whole cycle to be recorded with Moore in London (now on Vol. 2, 4/97), but that welcome event doesn’t in any way put these earlier offerings in the shade. Schiotz’s voice, when he was 33, was even fresher, his reading even more spontaneous in suggesting the vulnerable youth’s love and its loss, most poignant in an account of “Der Muller und der Bach” that surpasses in forlorn expression even those of such famed tenor interpreters as Patzak (Preiser, 11/89), Pears (Decca, 6/60 – nla), Schreier (Decca, 5/91) and Bostridge (Hyperion, 4/96) – but the whole sequence is a pleasure to hear for the plangency of Schiotz’s singing. It is interesting to compare him with Crooks (reviewed on page 105) in the cycle: for all Crooks’s romantic flights, it is the Danish singer who goes to the heart of the matter.
There follows part of the Mozart aria Per pieta that the tenor sang as test for EMI in 1938, interesting as a rarity but not special. By contrast all the Danish items are desirable, among them the two Hartmann offerings: Tell me, star of night, a haunting song, is given ideal voicing by Schiotz as is “Sverkel’s romance” from a romantic work, Little Christine, based on an Andersen fable. The two items by Lange-Muller, written as incidental music for a play called Once upon a time, are even better, in particular the magical “Midsummer Song”. The note-writer tells how wonderful was Schiotz’s singing of this item in an open-air performance in 1941. His recordings had made Schiotz famous and he also appeared the same year playing the role of Schubert in Lilac Time of which we hear an amusing pot-pourri (a photo in the booklet shows him in the part).
That Schiotz was not averse to popular items is confirmed by Riisager’s Mother Denmark, which he brought to London for that first session in May 1939. It is a song written for a diseuse about the delights of the homeland and Schiotz delivers it with the intimacy it calls for. Andrew Walter’s transfers are faultless and I highly recommend this further example of Anglo-Danish co-operation.'