Artur Schnabel: Complete Vocal Works
Steinway & Sons

Every release from the Steinway & Sons music label is special, but this one impresses for even more than the usual reasons. Naturally the Steinway piano played on the album sounds terrific, and the production of the recording, its performances captured at Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in Astoria in April 2022, is excellent too. But the seventy-eight-minute release is even more commendable for the performers it features, pianist Jenny Lin and contralto Sara Couden, and for a set-list that presents the vocal works of Artur Schnabel (1882-1951) in their entirety and includes the world premiere recording of his Five Songs for Voice and Piano.

Lin's established herself as a pianist of exceptional technical command and expressivity. She's known for performances of Glass's etudes, but her range is broad. She's recorded Chopin's nocturnes, an album of Broadway song arrangements, and a release featuring transcriptions of the songs of Chinese pop singer Teresa Teng; Lin also recently recorded an album of Kancheli music for Steinway & Sons with accordionist Guy Klucevsek. Of particular relevance is the fact that she earlier engaged with Schnabel in releasing an album of his complete solo piano music and is thus well primed for this collaboration with Couden. Possessing a warm, resplendent voice, the American contralto is recognized as a sterling interpreter of opera, oratorio, chamber music, and art song and is a sought-after recitalist. Her performances, which have taken place at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, are distinguished by deep sensitivity to the composer's text and nuanced readings. In contrast to Lin, Complete Vocal Works presents Couden's debut as an interpreter of Schnabel's music, and it's a challenge she meets splendidly.

Interestingly, Schnabel is better known as a pianist than composer and specifically for his association with the piano music of Beethoven but also that of Mozart, Brahms, and Schubert. Yet he also created a significant amount of material, including three symphonies, five string quartets, a piano concerto, chamber works, and over thirty pieces for solo keyboard, the latter recorded by Lin in 2019. A key development occurred in 1905 when he married Therese Behr (1876-1959), a German contralto he'd worked with as accompanist. The material presented on Complete Vocal Works was written for her and thus possesses a powerful personal dimension.

While Ten Songs for Voice and Piano, Op. 11 and Seven Songs for Voice and Piano, Op. 14, written between 1899 and 1903, generally adhere to the conventions of the late-Romantic idiom, there are surprises. A broad range of styles and moods is explored in the twenty-two songs that compose the three cycles, but even more striking is Notturno (1914), an audacious, twenty-three-minute travelogue first recorded in 1985 by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with composer Aribert Reimann at the piano. Lin contends that “it should be in the repertoire for singers,” and it's easy to concur after hearing her and Couden's engrossing rendition. While no one will mistake it for a work by Schoenberg, there is in the dreamlike evocation, its text by Richard Dehmel, a kind of harmonic daring reminiscent of the spirit that birthed Pelleas und Melisande, Verklärte Nacht, and Pierrot Lunaire.

One detects in the opening Five Songs for Voice and Piano (1902-06) the composer disentangling himself ever so subtly from the harmonic conventions of late-Romantic song (in its closing “Abfindung” in particular), something pursued most boldly in Notturno. Reflecting the breadth that characterizes a Schnabel song cycle, this opening set moves from the sombre drama of “Sphärengesang” (which invites comparison to Richard Strauss) to the comparatively rhapsodic “Frühlingsgruss” and innocently joyful “Das Mädchen mit den hellen Augen.” Moments of beauty emerge in the other cycles too, among them “Dann,” “Marienlied,” and “Waldnacht” in the ten-song set and “Frühling,” “Abendständchen,” and “Heisst es viel dich bitten?” in the seven.

January 2023