Two into one won't quite go; and that is the only drawback in what otherwise is one of the most valuable of all these recent transfers of old material on the CD. The Schubert recital is given complete, but from the Mozart four songs are missing, each a special loss. Das Veilchen and Dans un bois solitaire, irreplaceable performances both, have gone; also Die Alte, masterly in its knowledge of how far to go in comic characterization; and, unbelievably, Das Lied der Trennung which was probably the loveliest of all.
Riches enough remain. Among the Schubert songs, Gretchen am Spinnrade and Die junge Nonne live their intense lives with as strong a commitment of the total sensibility as they have ever enjoyed on records. Im Fruhling and Das Lied im Grunen find in Schwarzkopf a marvellously full response to all the slight shiftings of sunlight and shadow, yet she has an equally fine ear for the unity of phrase and of the song as a whole. Occasionally a fractional sharpness of pitch is momentarily exposed by the exceptionally precise definition of the tone; occasionally the rightness of instinct yields to a risky experimentation (as perhaps in An die Musik). But at worst Schwarzkopf is never dull, and at best, as in the strong, serious lines of Wehmuth, she is unsurpassed.
In the Mozart songs, recorded three years later in April 1955 (Walter Legge's first published stereo sessions), the voice seems even fresher and younger: perhaps an accident of time and place but a happy one since it corresponds to the nature of the music. Here, where there is serene simplicity, as in Im Frulingsanfange or Die Zufriedenheit, she preserves it; where she can employ her zest and skill as story-teller, as in Das Kinderspiel, she does so vividly; in the deeper mood of Abendempfindung she holds exactly that balance of deep feeling and restrained utterance that is the mark of a high civilization.
'Civilized' is also a word for the work of the two famous pianists: never assertive, always collaborative, Fischer making music with Schubertian intimacy, Gieseking with Mozartian delicacy. The CD clarifies further (including, in the Schubert, rather more than one really wants to know about the singer's breathing), and there is none of that end-of-side distortion that marred my copy of the original Schubert issue. Still, if you have the Mozart be sure to hold on to it for the sake of the missing items.'