# Seriously Out of Date?



## Buddha (Dec 8, 2014)

I first became interested in Schubert's lieder back in the 1970s, and I found that I really liked the baritones rather than the tenors for song cycles such as Die Winterreise or Die schöne Müllerin, so I wound up collecting Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Hermann Prey. Any recommendations on contemporaries/recent recordings that I should try out? Thanks!


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## JACE (Jul 18, 2014)

I like Wolfgang Holzmair. I don't have many of his recordings, but I think his Die Winterreise on Philips is excellent.

BTW: Are you Buddha from Savannah? If so, JACE = "HutchFan" from AAJ & organissimo!


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## Buddha (Dec 8, 2014)

hey, hf/JACE. yeah, they won't let me put up my avatar until I learn the secret handshake. Thanks for the reco on Holzmair.


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

Peter Schreier's recording of Die Schöne Müllerin was recorded in the 90s, I think, and is the best one I've heard. My copy is lost,and last time I checked it was no longer available to buy, except at crazy prices on Amazon Marketplace. If you wanted to go earlier rather than later than Prey or Fischer Dieskau, Franz Naval's Müllerin is also good, and in not bad sound for its advanced age.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Ian Bostridge is pretty good in fact.  Warner label.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

Winterreise, Dietrich Henschel, Teldec 2000


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## ptr (Jan 22, 2013)

I agree with Figleaf that that Schreier is on top of modern heap (not a baritone tho), but s I've said many a time and again, I would not want to be without Fritz Wunderlich or Aksel Schiøtz or Gérard Souzay... This said I notice that I often return to Mathias Görne and Christoph Prégardien!

/ptr


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Schreier's Wintereisse with Richter is the greatest performance on record imo. Utterly spellbinding. Sadly it was recorded in front of a bronchial audience 50% of whom appear to be in the last stages of pneumonia. But as a performance it cannot be bettered, not even by Schreier's later one with Schiff.


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

albertfallickwang said:


> Ian Bostridge is pretty good in fact.  Warner label.


I heard Ian Bostridge live in the chapel at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the mid 90s. The programme was all Schubert, though I think it was individual songs rather than one of the song cycles. (I heard so many lieder recitals of varying quality in those days I can't really remember.) I knew Bostridge was the brother in law of a guy in my year, but I had no idea he was a famous singer! After that concert, it seemed like you couldn't pick up a magazine or a broadsheet paper without reading the name of Ian Bostridge somewhere in its pages. (According to one of the organisers of the Magdalen gig, Ian was charming and considerate but the accompanist- I think it was Julius Drake- was a total prima donna, making them have the piano re-tuned even though it had just been tuned in readiness for the concert.)

Not long after there was a televised Winterreise with Bostridge, which was pretty good- I don't know whether it has made it on to DVD or YouTube. Bostridge is fine if you don't mind him sounding like the Oxford choral scholar he was, but for vocal splendour as well as interpretative insight I would choose Gerard Souzay with Dalton Baldwin.


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## nightscape (Jun 22, 2013)

Has anyone heard Goerne's recent rendition of *Winterreise* with Eschenbach on piano?


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

ptr said:


> I agree with Figleaf that that Schreier is on top of modern heap (not a baritone tho), but s I've said many a time and again, I would not want to be without Fritz Wunderlich or Aksel Schiøtz or Gérard Souzay... This said I notice that I often return to Mathias Görne and Christoph Prégardien!
> 
> /ptr


Aksel Schiøtz is one of those singers I keep meaning to investigate. Like, literally for twenty years I've been having the periodic thought 'I must get round to listening to Aksel Schiøtz'- but then forgetting to do anything about it. I could just dive into YouTube, and probably will, but what would you suggest is the best recording to pique the interest of a Schiøtz newbie?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Figleaf said:


> Peter Schreier's recording of Die Schöne Müllerin was recorded in the 90s, I think, and is the best one I've heard. My copy is lost,and last time I checked it was no longer available to buy, except at crazy prices on Amazon Marketplace. If you wanted to go earlier rather than later than Prey or Fischer Dieskau, Franz Naval's Müllerin is also good, and in not bad sound for its advanced age.


Schreier was a fine artist, but folks should know that his reedy vocal timbre is not to everyone's taste. Nowhere close to Wunderlich or Schiotz for beauty of tone. I can't listen to him for any length of time.


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Schreier was a fine artist, but folks should know that his reedy vocal timbre is not to everyone's taste. Nowhere close to Wunderlich or Schiotz for beauty of tone. I can't listen to him for any length of time.


Strangely, I never noticed the sound of his voice. His interpretation was so compelling that it didn't seem to matter- and then of course, the music is wonderful, even if the voice isn't the most gorgeous. I suppose one could say the same of Peter Pears, whose lieder recordings I have also enjoyed. I have another Schreier album of rather dull songs by Beethoven, and I haven't been able to get into that at all. Perhaps a more beautiful voice could rescue those songs for me!


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

I like Jonas Kaufmann's _Müllerin_. Highly embarrassing album cover, though:


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Ummm... Peter Schreier, Aksel Schiøtz, Ian Bostridge, and Jonas Kaufmann are all tenors, where the OP suggested a liking for baritone voices.

Might I suggest among more contemporary singers, the bass-baritone, Thomas Quasthoff, and the baritone, Matthias Goerne.



Honestly, I don't find Fischer-Dieskau to be in any way "out of date" any more than I might Maria Callas. Indeed, I would suggest you could do far worse than to explore the even older recording of _Winterreise_ by the magnificent Hans Hotter:


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

But you are not done with the older generation recordings. You need to pick up the cycle sung by Hans Hotter, or your 'out of date' (lol) collection is nowhere complete, either.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

For a truly intense and spellbinding performance of _Winterreise_ everyone should probably listen at least once to the performance of Peter Pears with Benjamin Britten. I love this review from Amazon... which is right on the mark:

_If I had to make a short list of "Winterreise" performances that I think every serious listener should hear, Pears/Britten would be on it. It seems to cast an entirely different light on the cycle than any other performance I have ever heard. It is sui generis, alien and profoundly "other," and it works in a bizarre way that I don't really understand, but which I find very intriguing. From the very beginning, Pears and Britten are in a different place, markedly distant from the "Winterreise" tradition that I have become familiar with. Every "Winterreise" performance (by a male singer)that I find persuasive, be it Hotter, Huesch, Fischer-Dieskau, Schmitt-Walter, or Anders, seems to move from a state of more or less normalcy into varying degrees of darkness and alienation. Pears and Britten, on the other hand, are alien from the first moment you hear them. You can well imagine why Mom and Dad are happy to find a more suitable husband for their little girl-- this guy is a geek, a weirdo, an outsider, not someone you could ever feel comfortable with. It's the quality of the voice, the strangely-flavored German, the little hitches and twitches in the rhythms, the occasional odd emphases. It's as if this protagonist is from another planet and the text and the music are being filtered through the Universal Translator. It's recognizable, yes, but everything is just that little bit "off," so that you are constantly off-balance and on edge. The expected progression away from what is comfortable and accustomed to a state of profound loneliness and alienation doesn't quite happen. When Pears sings "Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh ich wieder aus," it seems exactly true: he was weird when he came and he is still weird when he leaves, and somehow, thanks to Britten's playing, the whole outside world reflects his weirdness. When I try to imagine this fellow, I think of Heine's "Der arme Peter"-- the people who see him say that he looks as if he has just stepped out of the grave, but he is actually on his way to the grave. And he has had a "kick-me" sign on his back since birth. This "Winterreise" protagonist seems very similar, someone who could never fit in and has nowhere to go but down to destruction. If I follow Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore through "Winterreise," as I have done countless times, there is a mounting anxiety and uneasiness, as the wanderer feels himself drifting further and further away from life as everyone else lives it and finally realizes that he can never get back, that he will be isolated for the rest of his life. There is an underlying horror in "Der Leiermann," as if the wanderer is looking in a mirror and seeing his own face and realizing that this is what he has become. With Pears and Britten, on the other hand, it's almost as if he is going home to where he belongs. It's eerie. The cycle never resolves itself, you don't reach catharsis. Maybe it's what Schubert had in mind, I don't know. I just know that it makes me profoundly uncomfortable and I'm glad I have experienced it._

Of course Pears was a tenor... but what do I care? I have Schubert by bass, bass-baritone, baritone, mezzo-soprano, soprano, and more.


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## Giordano (Aug 10, 2014)

The only cycle I don't get tired of is Fritz Wunderlich's _Die schöne Müllerin_ -- tenor and old, so forget I said anything.


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## ptr (Jan 22, 2013)

Figleaf said:


> Aksel Schiøtz is one of those singers I keep meaning to investigate. Like, literally for twenty years I've been having the periodic thought 'I must get round to listening to Aksel Schiøtz'- but then forgetting to do anything about it. I could just dive into YouTube, and probably will, but what would you suggest is the best recording to pique the interest of a Schiøtz newbie?


His "Müllerin" is a good place to start, also his Nordic song's collection, I've seen Danacord's Schiøtz edition for very little money in several cut-out-outlets!

FWIW (and I've said it before), I rarely enjoy singers with and "English Language" background singing in German (or Italian), Peter Pears is one such (I've said the same about Ian Bostridge) and there is a number of US born singers that when I hear them singing in these languages my stomach want to empty it self over them, most of them are wonderful singers (technically) but their handling of the foreign language is appalling and if You can't handle its syntax You just should not sing in it! (I know I'm a jackass, but at least "I" am honest about it)

/ptr


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Schreier was a fine artist, but folks should know that his reedy vocal timbre is not to everyone's taste. Nowhere close to Wunderlich or Schiotz for beauty of tone. I can't listen to him for any length of time.


I have Wunderlich's Schone Mullerin and found it intensely disappointing not in the magnificent voice but the interpretation seems quite wooden compared with (e.g.) Schrieier's.


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

ptr said:


> His "Müllerin" is a good place to start, also his Nordic song's collection, I've seen Danacord's Schiøtz edition for very little money in several cut-out-outlets!
> 
> FWIW (and I've said it before), I rarely enjoy singers with and "English Language" background singing in German (or Italian), Peter Pears is one such (I've said the same about Ian Bostridge) and there is a number of US born singers that when I hear them singing in these languages my stomach want to empty it self over them, most of them are wonderful singers (technically) but their handling of the foreign language is appalling and if You can't handle its syntax You just should not sing in it! (I know I'm a jackass, but at least "I" am honest about it)
> 
> /ptr


Well, my German is appalling, so I'm not going to criticise Pears or Bostridge for theirs. The only anglophone singer whose mangling of the German language ever offended my ear was Elvis, in 'Wooden Heart'- but that belongs on another thread!

How do we feel about Schubert in English? It doesn't seem to exist any more: opera in the vernacular is still performed, but not lieder. It must be 'seriously out of date' in more than one way, but I have to post this classic 30s recording of 'Der Leiermann' by Harry Plunket Greene. He is one of those artist artists who modern singers should listen to and learn from.


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## Admiral (Dec 27, 2014)

This is singing. A terrific, natural, unaffected voice (cf. Peter Pears) Well-recorded and, well, simply joyous.

I have a BBC Music Magazine CD with these performers, if this is the same version this is great:








If you're looking for a newer baritone, I've heard Kevin McMillan live and he's outstanding, probably has some lieder recordings on Canadian labels.


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