As this ‘Schubertiade’ is a wondrous addition to this unique venture, it is hard to know where to begin in its praise. It has several centres of excellence, the first being Schafer’s beseeching, urgent account of the Mignon settings from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister that make plain, if nothing else does, her pre-eminence today among sopranos in Lieder, following the royal line of Schwarzkopf, Seefried, Mathis and Ameling, yet wholly individual in timbre and style. Next comes Ainsley’s winningly fresh account of An Silvia. You may be as surprised as I was at how wholly new-minted Ainsley’s ardent tones and Johnson’s elating piano manage to make such a hackneyed song. Schafer and Johnson do the same service for Horch, horch! die Lerch’.
Then comes the extraordinary discovery of this volume. As a rule Johnson has excluded unaccompanied vocal pieces from his project. He has happily made an exception in the case of the astonishingly original (even for Schubert) Seidl setting Grab und Mond, which touches on eternal matters, or rather the permanence of death, a message starkly expressed in typically daring harmony. The London Schubert Chorale give it a spellbinding interpretation and also contribute positively to a performance of another Seidl setting, the better-known Nachthelle, where the high-lying tenor lead provides no problems for Ainsley.
There have to be reservations over the work of Richard Jackson. No amount of creative intelligence can mask the fact that his dried-out tone is inadequate to the demands of Der Einsame, the unjustly neglected Totengraberweise and Der Wanderer an den Mond, which call for a richer palette of sound as provided by Fischer-Dieskau in his ‘complete’ Schubert on DG (3/93). Der Wanderer an den Mond itself is better served, in any case, by Dame Margaret Price in an earlier volume of this series (Hyperion, 2/93).
Throughout, Johnson’s playing and, of course, his admirable notes (now so voluminous that Hyperion are housing the discs in a handsome, larger format) are their customary sources of pleasure and enlightenment. The recording is well-nigh faultless.'