Introduction

Hyperion is a London based record label, founded by Ted Perry in 1980, and run by him until his death in 2003. Their catalogue now contains nearly 1000 CDs, including much of the standard repertory, but what particularly attracts me to the label is their obvious delight in exploring some of the less well travelled byways of the repertory. There is a full listing of their catalogue available on the net, which is well worth browsing. For some of the later CDs in the edition, this catalogue shows pictures of the CD, with sections from the notes.

As well as their more unusual recordings, they also have a wonderful habit of producing large scale series of particular works for composers. Amongst these are the complete Liszt solo piano music (a mere 95 discs), including 3 editions (9 discs) on Schubert transcriptions), 3 Henry Purcell series' (Odes & Welcome songs; Anthems and Services; Secular songs), the masses of John Taverner, The Church Music of John Sheppard, the Music of Robert Simpson, and so on.

And the Complete Schubert Lieder Edition.

This wonderful edition is the brainchild of Ted Perry and Graham Johnson OBE, Vice-president of the SIUK. There is a biography of Graham in the Hyperion pages. He is a career accompanist who studied with Geoffrey Parsons, and was subsequently aided and supported by Gerald Moore, whose legacy to Graham was his ten-volume Schubert edition full of pencilled markings. Graham was awarded the OBE in 1994.

Graham not only plays the piano on each of the CDs in the edition, but he also plans them, and writes all the notes and commentaries. The CD notes have now expanded into a significant reference source. Graham is said to be going to rework the notes in to a reference book, which would be most welcome. Some of the notes are so thick that it is physically quite awkward getting them in and out of the case, and the last few CDs now have a new type of case, big enough to hold them.

The early CDs started with fairly modest booklets (though still 20-24 pages or so). They soon began to grow, so that recent booklets run to about 50 pages. They typically give detailed historical, performing and/or technical notes on every song, with the text in the original language, and English translations (all of which come from Richard Wigmore, author of the book Schubert: The Complete Song Texts). There are frequent pictures, often of poets of the works or on illustrations associated with them. Now and then we find biographies of poets, and all but the first few CDs have essays on the subject of the CD. Initially these were a few paragraphs, but in the later CDs they can run to 6 or 7 pages.

Graham's avowed intention is to produce a complete edition of the Schubert Songs. Obviously Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore were enormously important in popularising Schubert's Lieder, and they did record the majority of them . However, their review was not complete - they did not record the 100 or so songs which can only really be sung by women, and they also deliberately ignored certain works (e.g. Adelwold und Emma). This edition intends to record them all. In the early CDs this target was described simply as '...all of Schubert's songs'. In the later recordings, this was amended to '...all of Schubert's songs (including ensembles, partsongs, alternative settings and fragments)'.

In some cases fragments are recorded as they stand (in #14, one fragment lasts a whole 28 seconds!). In other cases the fragment has been completed, sometimes by well known names such as Benjamin Britten, but in most cases by the Schubert Scholar, and the late SIUK honorary member, Reinhard Van Hoorickx.

Sometimes, different versions of the same song are very similar - perhaps not much more than a key change to support a different voice. There are also a few songs where Graham has deliberately set them more than once across the series, to give different perspectives on how the work can be performed.

Quite how many Schubert songs there are, is in itself an interesting question, since it depends upon exactly how you choose to classify the various fragments, part songs, alternative versions (no one doubts that Die Forelle is one song, but there are five autographs of it, all different in details), etc. Indeed, there is an appendix to The Schubert Song Companion in which John Reed describes the difficulties. He quotes the Gesamtausgabe as containing 603 songs, adding Reinhard van Hoorickx's additions brings the total to 660. Maurice Brown in one of his Essays gets to 708 (he gets to this number by including every variant). John Reed himself comes to 631.

Originally the hope was to complete the edition in time for the Schubert bicentenary in 1997, though this was not achieved, with the series completed in 1999.

So what about the CDs themselves? (N.B. the first dozen or so were also issued on cassette). As I have come to expect from Hyperion, they are all excellently recorded and engineered. Generally they are also generous in content, with most over 70 minutes (one just a few seconds short of 80 minutes), and just the one CD under the hour. In Britain, at least, they are typically just under 'full price'.

I have, however, experienced problems of 'bronzing' on a couple of CDs where after months of perfectly normal use, they have started to make clicking noises or consistently 'jump' on certain tracks. Hyperion tell me that this can occur on CDs produced between 1988 and 1993, and is due to the pressing company using a lacquer which was not suitable to withstand the corrosive effect of the sulphur content of paper used in the printing of CD booklets and other paper parts. Such discs are being replaced free of charge - if you think you suffer from this problem follow this link to the information page that Hyperion have set up.

In his planning, Graham has deliberately gone for mixed recitals. Most of the CDs have a single singer, or at least one major singer with perhaps a track or two with a supporting chorale, or another singer to perform a duet. The later disks were largely 'Schubertiad' disks, where 3 or 4 singers (or in some cases, many more) take turns to sing songs.

Graham has generally tried to make each disc a balance between the well known and the lesser known (but not necessarily less deserving) songs. This means that virtually every disk has some songs which are 'undiscovered gems'. None of the discs can be considered to be 'Schubert's greatest hits'! Graham has also tried to carefully match the singer to the songs, selecting the finest Schubert singers of today, including most of the well known current British singers, and many international ones.

I really cannot give a strong enough recommendation for this series, though collecting it will seriously damage your bank balance. If you love Schubert Lieder, you should have the whole collection - If you don't (yet) this series will convince you.

On the other pages in this section, there is a small review of each disk.. Graham Johnson (abbreviated to GJ) is the accompanist on each volume, so I won't bother repeating that fact. The older CDs in the collection are old friends to me, which I have been playing regularly and repeatedly for years. The newer CDs have to jostle for attention with these old friends, and so my opinions will necessarily be a little shallower.

As I've already indicated, the whole edition is very strongly recommended (so don't blame me if I run out of superlatives in the later reviews...), however, to give an impression of the relative worth of each disc in my view, I've scored them on the RM scale. On this scale, a brilliant 'must have' CD scores 10, a CD you wouldn't even use as a coffee mat scores 1.