Schubert
Schubert in English, Vol. 4 – Lieder (translated by J Sams)
Rowan Pierce (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone), Christopher Glynn (piano)
Signum Classics SIGCD770 73:48 mins
Purists may wrinkle their noses. Why record Schubert in English? As the pianist Christopher Glynn writes in the booklet that accompanies this album, it makes the atmosphere ‘a notch less reverential.’
There’s nothing at all reverential about Jeremy Sams’s translations of the 21 songs here. They are witty, fit the music like an expensive glove and tell good stories, but, importantly, they are essentially versions of the original poems – and not translations. So, in ‘An der Musik’, ‘Often a sigh, escaping from your harp, a sweet, celestial chord/has revealed to me a heaven of happier times’ becomes ‘A simple phrase, a half-remembered love-song, An age-old melody that’s somehow new …’ We’re only a step away from Eric Maschwitz’s ‘These foolish things remind me of you.’
No matter. Roderick Williams is in fine voice here: racing through ‘The Child of the Muses’ (Der Musensohn) at breakneck speed, darkening the voice for the bitter truths of ‘Love has lied’ (Die Liebe hat gelogen) and beautifully nuanced in the final verse of ‘The Wanderer’ with an almost defiant drop into the lower chest register on the phrase ‘Happiness is always far away’.
Rowan Pierce, his partner, is a young English soprano with a light lyric voice well suited to Mignon in the duet ‘Longing’ (Mignon und der Harfne). A tendency towards ‘breathiness’ is perhaps the consequence of what sounds like close mic-ing of both singers with the piano almost in their laps at times. However, Glynn is never less than thoughtful as the third member of this Schubertiade, playing a tender postlude for ‘In Spring’ (Im Frühling) that perfectly embraces Schubert’s gift of mixing sunlight and shadows. Christopher Cook