Hard on the heels of Margaret Price's new selection of Liszt songs (Teldec AZ6 43342, 12/86) comes one by Hildegard Behrens; and the catalogue is certainly big enough for both. The repertoire which overlaps shows how worthwhile it is for Liszt aficionados to invest in both recordings: the rarer songs which Behrens uncovers are discoveries indeed.
Behrens, like Price, anchors her selection with stalwarts like Mignons Lied, Die Loreley and Freudvoll und Leidvoll. Price's yearning Mignon is, of course, incomparable, with a good two minutes longer taken to spread the song's wings to convey both sehnsucht and fernesehn. But Behrens's radiance of tone and effortless ebb and flow of legato phrasing offers something unique both here and in the hypnotically oscillating Loreley. With Cord Garben's most delicately inflected accompaniment, wonder swiftly modulates to fear and dream.
The piano-playing is sweeter here, its acoustic warmer and kinder throughout. It enables the final touch of incorporeality to lift the Third Petrarch Sonnet, its words wound by Behrens with a fine, silk cantabile thread. Behrens the Wagnerian is also able to point the kinship between the two composers in songs like Ich liebe dich, to which she brings an expansive warmth simply by listening closely to the relationship of the vocal line to the underlying harmonies.
The collection, which is ordered to make a particularly satisfying armchair recital, is important for its inclusion of three long scenae. The Dumas Jeanne d'Arc au bucher was orchestrated by Liszt, but this later piano-accompanied version which he made in 1874 is haunting in the austerity of its dependence on a single rising diminished minor arpeggio which bears the spare, folk-like melody on to its major apotheosis in a call to patriotic action. La perla, a naively extended metaphor of the female condition, with words by the Princess von Hohenlohe, is another late work which finds out deliciously the contemplative lower regions of Behrens's voice; while Die Fischerstochter moves thrilling from a tremulous, unashamedly Schubertian expectancy to a near-Wagnerian breadth of rhapsody and rapture. Too late, alas, for the 1986 ''Critics' Choice''; but this is where that recording belongs.'