Schubert - Arias & Overtures

The Guardian 60

Behle/L’Orfeo Barockorchester/Gaigg
(Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)

Schubert, so the received opinion goes, wrote sublime songs and terrible operas. This recording can’t disprove the theory about the operas – which isn’t fair, since so many of them were unfinished at the time of his early death – but it backs up the idea that their faults were dramatic, rather than musical. All the tenor arias Daniel Behle sings here, some recorded for the first time, would hold their own on the concert platform; it is the lighter ones in which Schubert sounds his most magical self, including two from Die Freunde von Salamanka and a (perhaps inappropriately) jaunty number from the unfinished oratorio Lazarus.

Behle is very persuasive, singing with impeccable style and sounding airy and unencumbered; only in the terror-struck final track is his composure dented. Conducted by Michi Gaigg, the period-instrument ensemble L’Orfeo Barockorchester sound idiosyncratic in the unusually echoey acoustic, playing with lots of spirit but slightly less refinement.