We hear too little of Marjana Lipovsek in Britain, so her new recording receives a hearty welcome, and not least for its thoughtfully structured programme. Lipovsek has chosen those songs of Schubert with a strongly female persona: Goethe's Mignon and Gretchen, and Walter Scott's Ellen frame the contrasting vignettes of Suleika and the junge Nonne.
This Bavarian Radio studio recording provides a warm, resonant acoustic, almost superfluous in the light of Lipovsek's own warm and generous artistry, with Geoffrey Parsons in his most expansive mood. These songs remind us just what a flexible and richly variegated mezzo this is, and the personality behind it deserves more recognition than the accompanying booklet of song-texts alone provides.
Lipovsek's skill in the Mignon songs lies in her ability to convey both the ardent intensity and the childlike vulnerability of the character: the restrained yet meticulously controlled use of breath conveys longing without any emotional overload in ''Heiss mich nicht reden'', and a sense of real fear in ''Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt''.
For the King of Thule, a vibrato-less, otherworldly legato drains all colour from this haunting narrative: timing is all, and Lipovsek is in discreet control. Similarly in Gretchen am Spinnrade not too much is given too soon. Lipovsek prefers to build up a powerful sense of the depersonalization of a soul in torment whose waiting is long. Geoffrey Parsons maintains tension even within the comparatively slow pacing of the song, just as he bares eloquently Lipovsek's long, plangent vowels in the echoing assonances of Gretchen's prison-song, Gretchen im Zwinger.
In the rarely-performed six-minute Scene from Faust, D126b, Lipovsek as dramatist re-creates most sympathetically the three levels of consciousness: Gretchen's own suffocating fear; the torment of her guilt, insinuated through the voice of the Evil Spirit, and the intoning chorus.
As Scott's Lady of the Lake, she is in more benevolent mood, with each register mellifluously integrated; and in the lighter air of the Suleika songs the voice sheds its shadows and moves as lightly and freely as the West Wind itself.'