Fischer Dieskau Schubert Lieder

For five decades Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013) held a central position in the musical world. That centrality was reflected in a series of top orchestral and operatic posts and in his interpretations, free of self-regarding eccentricities. His modest but highly effective conducting technique also made him the ideal recording artist. Sawallisch was a Bavarian born in Munich, city of orchestras and a great opera company, which he headed for 21 years. He started his career as an outstanding pianist and remained a sought-after accompanist to great Lieder singers and instrumentalists. Volume 1 of a complete conspectus of his Warner Classics recordings (made for Electrola and EMI Classics between 1954 to 1997) includes wonderful Lieder and song collaborations, as well as famous concerto accompaniments for eminent soloists and a heartwarming traversal of Schubert's secular vocal and sacred choral music with Bavarian Radio colleagues. But the main focus among the 65 discs is on his symphonic achievements: Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner and Dvorák - the latter's Eighth Symphony was his first published recording, from 1954. Richard Strauss, an early influence, is strongly represented. This 65CD-box brings together all the non-operatic recordings that the German conductor and pianist Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013) made in the years from 1954 to 1997 for EMI Classics and Electrola (now Warner Classics).

Historically, Franz Schubert's lieder was first known only through a handful of standards sung in salons (often translated into the local language) and through extracts from his major cycles. Over time, the cycles became complete, and the list of songs considered masterpieces continued to grow. The record was not for nothing in this progressive discovery of neglected territories. The almost complete engraving by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the 1970s for Deutsche Grammophon obviously marked a turning point; we then realized that it was not little-known islets that were emerging, but an Atlantis.

Brilliant Classics' "Masterworks" series are a great way to amass a significant library of the works of several great composers. The production values and the performances themselves are uneven, and the interpretations are not always historically-informed. But there are numerous gems in the rough in The Masterworks, and the economic value is unsurpassed, even if you were to throw away half of the CDs in each set.
You're unlikely to throw away much of this Schubert collection though. This seems to be the finest of the Masterworks sets, with a succession of solid, often first-rate performances of most of the major Schubert works.

Schubert composed music for a wide range of forces and various genres including opera, liturgical music, chamber and solo piano music. While he was clearly influenced by the Classical sonata forms of Mozart and Beethoven (his early works, among them notably the 5th Symphony, are particularly Mozartian), his formal structures and his developments tend to give the impression more of melodic development than of harmonic drama. This sometimes lends them a discursive style: his music was described by Robert Schumann as running to "heavenly lengths". His innovations in the Classical style include the earliest examples of sonata form in which the exposition ends in the subdominant rather than the dominant (as in the last movement of the Trout Quintet).