Search - Franz [Vienna] Schubert, Andreas Staier, Christoph Prégardien :: Schubert: Schwanengesang and songs after Seidl [Hybrid SACD]

Sublime

Kurt Leland | 02/11/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is positively the most heart-rending and terrifying Schwanengesang cycle I've ever heard. If you ever wondered what Schubert felt in the last months of his life, knowing that he would soon die of syphilis, you will have no doubt after listening to the darker songs in the set. The sense of standing at the edge of the abyss is palpable, a tragedy of ancient Greek proportions.



Pregardien's vocal coloring of the words goes way beyond interpretation. It's as if he becomes the poet, the doomed composer. You don't even need to know German to get at the raw emotion. Staier's fortepiano creates a wonderful, almost impressionistic haze in the accompaniment, shading every turn of the text like a musical Doppelgänger.



The lighter songs in the set are delightfully frothy, but somehow make the gloomy ones even darker in contrast. The Seidl settings that fill out the program are less familiar, more lightweight, with the exception of the stunningly bright and sad (only Schubert can get them both at once!) Die Taubenpost, and the half-dark Der Wanderer an den Mond. They form an effective counterbalance to the Swan Songs.



But when experiencing the bleakness of Der Atlas, in which the whole weight of the world rests on the poet's (and songwriter's) shoulders, or Der Doppelgänger, with its terrified vision of the ghost of oneself damned to a limbo of lost love, I don't want to be lifted out of that mood and entertained.



Rilke said: "For beauty is just the beginning of terror." That's the world the best songs of this CD inhabit--the very definition of the sublime."