John Dalmas wrote: >Noticeably absent from Philip Peters' list of the Schubert song cycle is >the recording on RCA Victor by mezzo-soprano Elena Gerhardt with Gerald >Moore at the piano, regarded in its day by one noted critic as "the very >essence of Schubertian lyricism." This is true. I spent literally decades trying to find this one but it's very rare to the point of serious collectors being cinvinced that it doesn't exist. Whoever has a copy will be amply rewarded by me for a tape (Amply rewarded? Well....in a tape swap or something like that as I'm not a wealthy man by any stretch of the imaginiation). >Also, incomplete cycles from baritone Heinrich Schlusnus with Sebastian >Peschko or Franz Rupp at the piano (on London), bass Alexander Kipnis with >Egon Petri (on Columbia), and even tenor John McCormack (in English) with >orchestral accompaniment (on Victor). These I have and more but I regard four or five songs not as an *incomplete cycle* but as separate songs. Not that I did leave Tauber in (12 of 24 songs). >Among available recordings, I would recommend any one of the following: > >Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with Jorg Demus >Peter Pears, with Benjamin Britten >Hans Hotter, with Erik Werba (an earlier Hotter with Gerald Moore is not bad) I'd say this is the only of the five official Hotter recordings that I wouldn't recommended. Uncharacteristically Hotters' voice shows strain. Four years later, in 1969, when he recorded Winterreise for the last time (live in Japan) he did a lot better. >Christa Ludwig, with James Levine There is a 1980 recording by Ludwig with Werba which is much better IMO. >Peter Anders, with Michael Rauchheisen I like the later one with Weissenborn better. Not only is Weissenborn a much better pianist than Raucheisen but I also prefer this more sober, introverted version which probes deep into the dark secrets of Winterreise to the more extroverted, opera-like earlier one. >As the songs in this cycle will speak to you in a special way, almost any >version may please you depending on your threshold of pain from the loss >of love, and your degree of response to Schubert's melancholy landscape. Now ain't that a fact? Philip