Baritone Roderick Williams, in mid-career, decided to finally take on the monuments of Schubert's songs, and the results have been impressive. This release may be the high point for those wanting just one release, for it adds, as a curtain-raiser, the beginning of the whole Romantic song cycle tradition, Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98. This cycle, although it is not far from Schubert in many ways, has a different relationship between voice and piano, with the latter more prominent. Williams and accompanist Iain ...
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Baritone Roderick Williams, in mid-career, decided to finally take on the monuments of Schubert's songs, and the results have been impressive. This release may be the high point for those wanting just one release, for it adds, as a curtain-raiser, the beginning of the whole Romantic song cycle tradition, Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98. This cycle, although it is not far from Schubert in many ways, has a different relationship between voice and piano, with the latter more prominent. Williams and accompanist Iain Burnside adjust to this difference seamlessly, and the program as a whole reveals many colors in Williams' baritone voice. It's worth remembering that Schubert's Schwanengesang, D. 957, was not a song cycle or even intended as a single set: Schubert, who had no plans to die young after its completion, planned to publish the songs by individual poets, Ludwig Rellstab and Heinrich Heine, separately. There is no fixed narrator, and the Heine songs which Williams places at the end, are of...
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