Schubert Complete

In this recording of the complete piano sonatas on period instruments, the Viennese master Paul Badura-Skoda delivers the work of a lifetime: Schubert's music with his passion, his suffering, and that inimitable tone which makes his native city the place so essentially and existentially identified with music. This collection of the twenty Sonatas for period piano recorded by Paul Badura-Skoda on the instruments in his own collection has every chance of being considered by posterity as one of the most creative and most significant achievements.

Listening to this beautifully played collection of Schubert’s piano trios, the two completed ones and the lonely single movements, I realized that this is the one recording I have that was made on fortepiano. Other favorites, including the recordings by the Beaux Arts Trio, the lesser known Trio di Trieste, and the more romantic recording by Arthur Grumiaux, Pierre Fournier, and Nikita Magaloff, are on modern instruments. That wouldn’t matter, perhaps, if the performances on this new disc were less convincing. Jan Vermeulen has been recording the Schubert sonatas to great acclaim. He now has added a recording of the trios that is clearly articulated, impassioned, at times even jaunty.

When an ensemble seeks to record a complete body of work, there will inevitably be some works of lesser quality among the masterpieces. In the second volume of the Singphoniker's collection of Schubert's complete part-songs for male voices, there are the masterpieces the sublime early version of Gesang der Geister über den Wasser (D. 538) and the transcendent choral version of Sehnsucht (D. 656) and then there are the composition exercises that Schubert wrote for Salieri when he was in his early teens.

This disc, Vol. 4 four of Singphoniker's five-volume collection of the complete part-songs for male voices, may be the weakest in the series. All the others have one or more indisputable masterpieces on them. Even Vol. 1, with its half-dozen drinking songs, and Vol. 2, with its half-dozen composition exercises, still have a few masterpieces. But while Vol. 4 has no composition exercises and few drinking songs, it has the lowest number of masterpieces and the highest number of nearly unknown Schubert songs. But there are still Schubert songs and so great a composer of songs was Schubert that even his least-known songs are often still wonderful.

Initially a bassoonist, Marc Minkowski began conducting at an early age, notably under the guidance of Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in the United States. At the age of nineteen he founded Les Musiciens du Louvre, an ensemble that was to play an active role in the Baroque revival. After their success at the Wiener Konzerthaus in 2009 with a complete cycle of Haydn's 'London' Symphonies recorded live by Na+¯ve (their exclusive record label since 2007), Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble now release the complete Schubert symphonies.

Of all Schubert's songs, the part songs for male voices are probably the hardest for contemporary audiences to take seriously. The sweetness of the harmonies recalls the saccharine harmonies of barbershop quartets, the emotions of the lyrics recall the sentimentality of greeting cards, and the sheer ubiquity of drinking songs recalls the inebriated bowling banquets of the Beneficent Order of Elks. But while Schubert's part songs for male voices are in many ways the precursors of all these smarmy things, they are themselves quite lovely.

Although some of the other volumes in the Singphoniker's collection of Schubert's complete part-songs for male voices have greater masterpieces – Vol. 1's Nachthelle (D. 892) and Vol. 5's Gesang der Geister über den Wasser (D. 714) – Vol. 3 has the highest number of good songs and the lowest number of composition exercises, which may make it the most easily appealing volume. Starting with the glorious Wein und Liebe (D. 901) and ending with the exquisite Grab und Mond (D. 893), there are hardly any songs in this collection that are not first-rate Schubert.

A prestigious project: the recording of the complete string quartets of Franz Schubert, by the German Diogenes Quartet. Volume 1 offers one masterpiece, the famous Rosamunde Quartet in A minor, and the early quartet in D major D94. Schubert’s String Quartets count among the most frequently performed quartets of the repertoire (only rivalled by Beethoven). These works express Schubert’s superb gift as a melodist within the classical structure of a string quartet, unique creations of romantic content and classical form.