Schubert Lieder, SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Schubert was a wonderful composer and left an amazing legacy of all kinds of music including songs (lieder). The problem with trying to access his song reportoire is the vast

quantity of it - he wrote over 600 songs. Jim Svejda the dean of classical music appreciation said of them, "It is still difficult to offer any coherent recommendation of Schubert song recordings. ...lieder...continue to appeal to a small but rabid crowd."  It took me 50 years of listening to classical music to get around to them but now I find that I enjoy them when I can't find anything else I  want to listen to.

So, to write a piece that that gives a fair overview of Schubert's songs is a challenge because there are 600 of them which I am listening through, and every important singer male and female recorded them on innumerable recordings and they are all sung and indexed in German which I do not read or speak.

Fortunately  the genius Spotify playlist creator Ulysses who has 175,000 Spotify followers and assembles countless stupefying monster playlists like all the compositions of many composers, all the Gramophone awards by year etc. put together a complete Schubert Lied playlist consisting of of all Schubert songs on the Naxos label (35 cd's). And one can always depend on this label to make great recordings - both in engineering and performance, They are the future and the savior of classical music.

Below is a preliminary playlist to get started and I will be adding more songs as I listen through them. Ian Bostridge is a famed interpreter of these songs and while I usually really like about one in twenty Schubert songs, on Bostridge's albums I like one in two. The playlist consists of half the selections on this album + another  by Roman Trekel.

This is a good explanation of how one of his songs works musically.

The complete Schubert Lieder Naxos Playlist