Schubert: Schwanengesang & String Quintet

The term "swan song" goes back to Greek mythology, according to which swans sing one last song with a beautiful voice shortly before their death, a concept that was later applied to the last works of composers and writers. This production on ALPHA CLASSICS brings together two works by Franz Schubert that are virtually exemplary of this romanticized view of an artist's work. But of all works, the one that already bears the myth in its name is neither a cycle intended by the composer, nor do the 14 sometimes cheerful, sometimes somber and melancholy songs after poems by Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gabriel Seidl exude an explicit opening towards the otherworldly. In the year of its composition, Schubert had also written the String Quintet in C major, D 956, whose slow movement is often cited as an example of a swan song, but the other movements of the quintet exude an almost orchestral vitality that seems to contradict the image of the last song, already closed with the world. Here, a top-class group of artists (including the tenor Julian Prégardien, the pianist Martin Helmchen and the violinist Christian Tetzlaff) is offered a welcome opportunity to approach the works away from outdated, romanticized clichés, and the listener the chance to experience the pieces in a new way. The interpretive and conceptual approach is so moving not least because it comes - like death at times - from the midst of life.