However many versions one may have heard of this cycle in public and on disc in recent years, there should always be time to listen to a reading as profound and satisfying as this, one of the classics of the gramophone era. It has lost none of its power to create wonder in the ear and mind—wonder that so many points can be made so logically, so cogently, so heartbreakingly and, above all, with such a unity of thought from both artists. That degree of instinctively thinking together can only have come from long hours spent on preparing the cycle: its public performance from this unique duo will always remain one of the most memorable musical events of the 1960s for those of us lucky enough to have encountered it on more than one occasion.
In his introduction to this CD, Graham Johnson (whose name has been heinously omitted by Decca from the English version of his text) comments that ''the fingers on the keyboard and the feet on the pedals (what pedalling!) are directed by the brain and heart of a great composer and a great dramatist-through-music into the bargain''. On every page of every song, Britten's illuminations are there to be marvelled at. I must itemize a few—the subtle rubato in the fourth song, the emphases in the rippling triplets of the fifth, the steady, precise accents in the seventh, the heavy, energy-less tread in the tenth, the supremely even and beautiful touch in the second and fourth verses of the eleventh, the restless 6/8 of the nineteenth, the descent into death at the end of the twentieth. All these detailed points are held within speeds that are in every case the right ones, or seem so here.
As for Pears, this performance is surely as telling a monument to his art as are his Evangelist or his performances in Britten's own works. He inhabits the world of the outcast, broken lover with total conviction. The special colour and feeling given to ''Schweigen'' in ''Erstarrung'', the world-weariness of ''Wie weit noch bists zu Bahre'' in ''Der greise Kopf'', the sustained pianissimo of ''Die Nebensonnen'', the measured numbness of the final question in ''Der Leiermann''. These and so much else are the work of a truly re-creative artist, such as he was as much as Britten. Above all there is that unity of thought and feeling between the two, felt as compellingly in ''Letzte Hoffnung'' as anywhere. Is it all too refined, too thought out, ''a perfectly achieved artifact'', as HF put it in Song on Record I (Cambridge University Press: 1986) that ''leaves less space for imagination''? On listening to the reading again I did not find it so, I would only suggest that Schreier's obviously more idiomatic German and even more searing tone may be preferable to that of Pears, but Schreier and Richter (Philips—a Gramophone Award-winner) cannot lay claim to anything like such a unified approach. That may come in Schreier's forthcoming version with Schiff also on Decca. Even so, nobody should be without the profound insights offered here—and at mid-price. The only fault in the recording concerns a slightly too dampened sound from the piano.'