Not in so many words perhaps, but to roughly similar effect, this review might have begun with a summary such as: ‘a bouquet of songs, something for everybody, an entertaining evening, a pot-pourri’. That is how the artists’ own booklet-note starts, only to be followed by a dismissive ‘Far from it!‘. I still don’t quite see why. They go on to speak of the surprising ‘playful lightness’ and to defend themselves (unnecessarily, I would have thought) against a possible charge of making ‘a populistic blunder’ in presenting a programme of such ‘colourfulness and variety’. Allowing for the hazards of mistranslation, the explanatory note is hardly a helpful substitute for what is really needed here: a brief guide not so much in how to follow Goethe as how to follow the compilers’ thoughts in the selection and its ordering.
’An entertaining evening’ it surely is, and the ‘bouquet of flowers’ a delightful one. The bright colours stand out: Schumann’s Freisinn with its lure of adventure, Beethoven’s Neue Liebe, Wolf’s Rattenfanger. Novelties in choice of setting include Loewe’s Erlkonig (at one time more popular than Schubert’s) and Schumann’s Singet nicht in Trauertonen, usually neglected in favour of Wolf’s Philine. In darker colours and deeper mood, Schubert’s and Loewe’s settings of Wandrers Nachtlied make an interesting comparison, and Wolf’s Phanomen sends one back for an instant replay, weaving again that veritable rainbow of subtly tinted modulations.
Pregardien’s voice, too, has its matching and contrasting shades, the silvery grey gleaming gently and with most characteristic beauty in songs such as Erster Verlust and Anakreons Grab. He has a remarkable accompanist in Michael Gees, two of whose compositions enrich the programme. To him falls the challenge of Schubert’s Versunken in which, as Graham Johnson observed, the image of a five-toothed comb sets the right hand to work while the left makes naughty lover-like explorations at will. If invited to pluck two blooms from the bouquet it would be that and the contrasting Jagers Abendlied which follows.'