…this is one of the darkest, slowest Schwanengesangs on disc: there is a unique menace in the final 'Gute Nacht' of 'Kriegers Ahnung'; and 'In der Ferne' gives full, long weight to those six slow pulses within the last word of each line. Schreier's recital also offers consummate performances of Schubert's Goethe settings...

The 1991 recital by Peter Schreier and András Schiff is highly desirable, though the sound is not quite on the same level. Schreier was never the most honeyed of tenors; but in the lighter songs of Schwanengesang he compensates for a touch of reediness and a tendency to harden on high notes with the supple grace of his phrasing and his ultra-keen response to the text. Liebesbotschaft is eager and volatile, enhanced by Schiff's wonderfully limpid touch and his care to make the piano's singing left hand match the voice in eloquence (Schubert's original, high, key an advantage, here and elsewhere).
On the downside, Aufenthalt is surely too slow and life-weary, weighed down by recurrent submissive rallentandos. But Das Fischermädchen has a lilting tenderness, Schiff again singing in dulcet partnership with the voice, while in the remaining Heine songs singer and pianist unflinchingly probe the extremes of anguish and bitterness. Die Stadt (the swirling, impressionistic arpeggios eerily insubstantial from Schiff) and Der Doppelgänger are as desolate and disturbing as any performances on disc, the suggestion of a whine, even a sneer, in Schreier's timbre extraordinarily apt here.
After this we get a sharply characterised Goethe group that encompasses the bleakness of the three Harper's Songs (done with characteristic intense immediacy) and ends with an impulsive, dancing Der Musensohn that rightly brings the house down.

Schreier was never the most honeyed of tenors; but in the lighter songs of Schwanengesang he compensates for a touch of reediness and a tendency to harden on high notes with the supple grace of his phrasing and his ultra-keen response to the text. Liebesbotschaft is eager and volatile, enhanced by Schiff's wonderfully limpid touch and his care to make the piano's singing left hand match the voice in eloquence... Das Fischermädchen has a lilting tenderness, Schiff again singing in dulcet partnership with the voice... Die Stadt (the swirling, impressionistic arpeggios eerily insubstantial from Schiff) and Der Doppelgänger are as desolate and disturbing as any performances on disc...