First Gulda, who in a brief but uncommonly personal sleeve-note, confesses to having felt a deep desire to ''plunge deep into Robert Schumann's fantastic-romantic sphere, both as Ursula Anders's accompanist and as soloist''. In both contexts I find him wholly winning in the role of Eusebius, but rather less pleasing as the more excitable Florestan. Of the Fantasiestucke, Op. 12, he plays ''Des Abends'' slowly and with an affecting response to Schumann's sehr innig. ''Warum?'' is equally poetic. He is also immensely characterful in the more spirited ''Grillen'' and ''Ende vom Lied'', while most of ''Fabel'' and ''Traumes-Wirren'' are persuasive too. But in trying to find the speed and elation of ''Aufschwung'' and the passionate drive of ''In der Nacht'' he forces and coarsens tone and texture; in the climaxes of these two pieces the piano acquires a metallic edge.
In the Liederkreis cycle Gulda again slightly forces the issue when excited, as in the climaxes of ''Waldesgesprach'', ''Schone Fremde'' and ''Fruhlingsnacht''. But always he is a great source of strength in evocation of mood. His soprano, Ursula Anders, tells in her own brief sleeve-note how they immersed themselves in this great cycle together, in rural solitude and close communion with nature, so that ''the poet's words and the composer's music became one with their source and their inspiration, and the direct experience of all the wonderful things they tell of gave certainty to our feelings in the interpretation''. Her own sympathy with Eichendorff and Schumann is never in doubt. But in characterization she is handicapped by a soprano voice neither large, nor long-breathed, nor greatly varied in colour; with vibrato reduced to the minimum she sings with a choir-boy-like tonal purity and innocence that almost made me choose the word treble rather than soprano. Intonation is mostly reliable except for those soft C sharps at the start of the reiterated, ascending phrase in ''Mondnacht'', and much of what we hear is pretty-toned and touchingly simple—as, for instance, ''Die Stille''. But the music's inner intensity has always to come from the piano. There is a courageous attempt at characterization though colour in the dialogue of ''Waldesgesprach'' (taken very briskly), but surely she carries tonelessness too far in ''Auf einer Burg'', which sounds almost as if sung in her sleep, and perhaps in ''Zwielicht'' too, which is also faster than we often hear it (but there is a great deal of anything but hurried slow tempo elsewhere).
The recorded sound is natural and agreeable—except when Gulda allows his fortissimo to harden.'