The songs which Schumann wrote for the delight of middle-class amateurs as they gathered round the piano, have turned into regular festival fare, redolent of long summer evenings and heavily perfumed air. Plus ca change... This disc captures it all in a warm, well-balanced recording made at the 1984 Bad Urach Herbstliche Musiktage.
The Spanisches Liederspiel are just what their name implies: playing pieces, paraphrased from the original Spanish of Emanuel Geibel, in which the four voices are lightly shuffled between word, rhyme and dancing piano accompaniment, relished to the full by Helmut Deutsch. Marjana Lipovsek's pungent contralto is the perfect foil for Mitsuko Shirai's bright soprano in their breathless protestations of love in ''Erste Begegung'' and ''Botschaft''. The voices weave imitative tendrils of jasmine in and out of the piano's lightly scented waltz. Shirai finds in ''Melancholie'' a solo of unpredictable leaping intervals, negotiated with just the right pathos. All four trot off together in ''Es ist verraten'', and break away in coy pairs for their individual declarations of love in ''Ich bin geliebt''.
The Spanische Liebeslieder form a much more sustantial centrepiece: solos, duets and a gently retrospective quartet finale are framed by a concert-piece Vorspiel for four hands and a stately Nationaltanz intermezzo. The cycle gives Matthias Holle a rare look-in: he offers a somewhat sturdy Romanze in ''Flutenreicher Ebro'', contrasting nicely with Josef Protschka's light and lusty refrain-song in praise of womankind ( ''wie so schon, wie so schon''). They join voices in praise of a pair of blue eyes, following Lipovsek's reflective ''Hoch, hoch sind die Berge'', phrased in faultless legato.
The two Spanish groups frame two groups of Vier Duette for soprano and tenor. Helmut Deutsch provides deft piano-playing for the earlier group of 1840 drawing-room miniatures: the hypnotic hammock-lilt of ''Liebesgarten'', for instance, artfully distracts the ear from Schumann's true art in setting one voice's motion against the other.
Norman Shetler takes over in the more sophisticated 1849 group, with its ''Tanzlied'', in which both voices follow the lilt of Ruckert's rhyme scheme and cunningly counterpointed lines against a dizzy background waltz; and where Goethe's ''Ich denke dein'' is turned into a double litany, each voice looking, as it were, into the eyes of the other.'