In terms of content and performance, this is – with a single exception – one of the most rewarding CDs to date in this whole, comprehensive Lieder Edition. But, like all the most satisfying experiences in the world of art, it calls for concentrated study on the part of the listener, starting with Johnson’s long and often revelatory introduction to the disc as a whole, which charts Schubert’s development in the years 1819-20 when he was releasing himself from the somewhat overpowering influence and emotional stimulus of the poet Mayrhofer. These were also years, as Johnson avers, when Schubert was at his most exploratory – and that’s certainly borne out by the songs he and Lipovsek perform. As such they repay repeated listening when their secrets can be fully revealed.
Lipovsek begins and ends this utterly absorbing recital with two notable, seldom-performed songs. Abendbilder, concerned as Johnson states “with heartfelt and haunting intimations of mortality at eventide”, is typically wide-ranging (in terms of mood and harmony) to which Lipovsek brings an answering breadth of energy and expression. The closing piece, Im Walde, crowning glory of Schubert’s setting of Schlegel, has a moto perpetuo accompaniment of tremendous power, played in unfettered style by Johnson, over which the protagonist sings with the visceral excitement predicated by Johnson deriving from her experience in the opera house. It is to my mind far more convincing than Gorne’s more lax account in Vol. 27 (1/97).
In between come the extraordinary, seldom-heard settings of the metaphysical poet Novalis (on whom Johnson writes with typical perception). The first and last of these songs are masterpieces. In Hymne I, Novalis sublimates his love for a dead girl in poetry of unearthly beauty, matched by Schubert’s chastely economic setting. Even greater is Nachthymne where again, as Johnson puts it, Schubert “combines the deeply spiritual with the erotic and maintains these two powerful elements in as effortless a musical balance as he does the poet in his verbal imagery”. Lipovsek and her partner perform it with an inspiration surely prompted by the quality of the music.
One other song is on this level, the much more familiar Uhland setting Fruhlingsglaube, where the performers are just as convincing as they are in the charming Blondel zu Marien and Morgenlied, a Werner setting which has Schubert marvellously alternating his lyrical and philosophical styles, all confidently adumbrated by his interpreters.
The one disappointment is the long piece Einsamkeit at the centre of the disc. Although Johnson makes a case for this mini-cycle comprising an extended poem by Mayrhofer, the setting – at least until its last two stanzas – is Schubert at his least engaging, and the stodgy performance by Nathan Berg doesn’t help (even Fischer-Dieskau, with his vast resources and experience, is nearly defeated by the desultory writing, DG, 3/93). As it happens the recording of Berg’s voice has little of the immediacy afforded Lipovsek, whose warm, expressive style, idiomatic but unexaggerated diction and sensible use of portamento make her a very welcome visitor to the series.'