Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis's new Schwanengesang completes a journey begun with their 2009 Winterreise and last year's Die Schone Mullerin.
The 14 Lieder of the composer's "swansong" were put together by a publisher after Schubert's death. Schwanengesang may not have the underpinning narrative of Winterreise or Schone Mullerin, but there is ample compensation in its emotional intensity. It has become something of a window into the composer's soul.
As Gavin Plumley notes in the CD booklet, it "confirms much of the now prevalent mythology around Schubert: a misunderstood Romantic, contradictory, sexually ambiguous and ultimately evasive".
Mark Padmore is an eloquent spokesman for the art he understands so well. He talks of searching out the poetry in the music and the words; he feels that his partnership with Paul Lewis benefits from the pianist's own profound engagement with the literature of his instrument.
You can hear all this in the opening Liebesbotschaft. Padmore is subtle, sometimes risking a near-whisper; when Lewis's piano is not a rippling shaft of light, its bass lines elegantly wind around Padmore's beautifully sculpted melody.
