The German soprano Julia Kleiter joins Julius Drake for the sixth volume of Hyperion’s Liszt survey, which covers the years 1841 to 1859, a period that saw Liszt abandon his career as a concert virtuoso in order to concentrate on composition and take up his position as Kapellmeister in Weimar, where he was to remain until 1861. Many of the songs here have an almost operatic intensity and weight, a reminder, perhaps, that Liszt was also contemporaneously working on his eventually abandoned opera Sardanapalo, which occupied him intermittently for almost a decade from 1842. Now that we have Kirill Karabits’s recording of David Trippett’s reconstruction of Sardanapalo’s first act (Audite, 2/19), we’re perhaps in a better position to understand the relationship between opera and song in Liszt’s imagination.

Many of Liszt’s early songs were geared to salon performance by the major singers of his day. The first ‘Loreley’, ‘Mignons Lied’ and ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’ (1841, 1842 and 1843 respectively) are in essence dramatic monologues, while ‘Die Macht der Musik’, from 1848, is effectively a cantata for voice and piano, cast along the lines of an operatic scena, with an introductory recitative followed by a long bel canto melody that invites comparison with the aria that Liszt provided for his heroine Mirra in Sardanapalo’s first scene. In later revisions and recompositions, he tended to tone the innate theatricality down. Kleiter and Drake give us the second versions, dating from 1859, of both the Hugo settings and the Lieder aus Schillers Wilhelm Tell: while the former remain innately operatic – ‘Oh! quand je dors’ is grandly ecstatic – the Schiller settings, revised, one suspects, to emphasise their textual emphasis on transience, are altogether more muted than the rapturous originals, unforgettably recorded by Matthew Polenzani on the first disc of the series (1/11).

The performances here blaze with conviction. Kleiter’s tone is wonderfully even and exceptionally beautiful over a wide vocal range, and her commitment is never for a second in doubt. Mignon’s anguish is vividly realised as Liszt tellingly blurs the distinctions between the lover, protector and father to whom the song is addressed and Drake whips up a veritable storm at the mention of ‘der Drachen alte Brut’ that tips the music towards nightmare. Kleiter unleashes a glorious flood of sound at the climactic invocation of ‘Musik, du Mächtige’ in ‘Die Macht der Musik’, but she’s also capable of ravishing pianissimos in the exquisite ‘Kling leise, mein Lied’ and at the close of ‘Oh! quand je dors’, where the final phrase drifts wistfully upwards to its final silence. Drake is similarly at his best here, providing darkness as well as wit in ‘Enfant, si j’étais roi’ and a real display of virtuosity, drama and colour as the boat sinks in ‘Die Loreley’. A marvellous disc and a great recital in its own right, this is arguably the finest instalment of the series to date. Do listen to it.