The ongoing giant project on the part of the Naxos label to record all of Schubert's songs is based on a classification scheme originally suggested by Schubert himself in a private publication of some of his songs: he grouped them by poet. The specific reaction of Schubert to Goethe's poetry has provided fertile ground for singers' interpretations for years, and the Naxos series has revealed a host of similar possibilities with other poets and genres, even if those possibilites have not always been exploited by the ...
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The ongoing giant project on the part of the Naxos label to record all of Schubert's songs is based on a classification scheme originally suggested by Schubert himself in a private publication of some of his songs: he grouped them by poet. The specific reaction of Schubert to Goethe's poetry has provided fertile ground for singers' interpretations for years, and the Naxos series has revealed a host of similar possibilities with other poets and genres, even if those possibilites have not always been exploited by the performers involved. The concept is perhaps at its weakest in catchall categories like the "Austrian Contemporaries" of the present disc and its two companions, for the poems Schubert sets (reproduced not in the booklet but on a website containing an Adobe Acrobat file, in German and English) have little in common beyond chronological contiguity with Schubert's own career. The plus side is that the album resurrects some of the rarer Schubert songs -- rarer precisely because the poets are...
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