Affordable reissue of the best performances of the lieder fo
avraham stoler | San Francisco | 07/14/2010
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Contents: This set includes most (a few songs excepted) of the lieder written by Schubert for the male voice, including the famous song-cycles.
Performances: The performers are Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore. Generally, these are the best performances available. Fischer-Dieskau had a magnificent voice, and German is his native language. Moore was an excellent accompanist. You might find a better version of a certain work or certain songs, but no one complete (or close to complete) survey is as uniformly excellent and satisfying. In my opinion, having the same singer can be an advantage, especially when one is interested in uniformity of style. This is an advantage over the Hyperion set (which is also essential, being much more complete - it includes all of the lieder Schubert wrote and 3 CDs of songs by contemporaries, for a total of 40 CDs).
Sound: The sound is excellent, and I haven't noticed changes since the last edition of this box set. It was recorded more than 40 years ago (in 1967), but DG always had excellent sound engineers.
Changes from the last edition: The earlier edition of this set is still available on Amazon, and retails for about twice the price. The difference between the versions is that this new, cheaper version has a thin booklet which only includes a lieder index (both alphabetical and by CD number), while the older set has a booklet which includes the text (and translations to English) of all the lieder. However, DG has made available the text and translations on their web site as PDF files (and the address to get them is clearly written in the new booklet - you will not need to hopelessly search for it on DG's site). Moreover, the old booklet did not have an alphabetical song index, so this is a major improvement for people who often are looking for a specific song.
Packaging: Standard box set packaging in reasonable quality (not the cheapest cardboard that will quickly disintegrate like, say, EMI's recent budget sets). The cd's come in cardboard, and the package is very compact. There are 21 CDs overall.
In short, this is the familiar older classic set, with alphabetical lieder index added, and at half the price. At about $3 per CD, what exactly are you waiting for?"
