The spirit is willing but the flesh, or at least the voice, is not. Gérard Souzay was one of the great masters of the art song; his recordings from the late 1940s to the 1960s stand among the best ever. Alas, this Winterreise was made in 1976, the Schwanengesang in 1972, by which time the voice that had impressed with plush ease throughout its range was frayed, and the flawless technique showed tatters at its edges. Souzay recorded a Winterreise in the 1950s, and another for Philips in 1963, and my familiarity with the latter only deepens my disappointment in this later effort. And "effort" is the operative word, for there are countless instances on both discs in this set where good interpretive intentions founder on the rock of vocal limitations. Thus Souzay's beautiful upper-register singing in Gefror'ne Tränen is labored and colorless, and the quickness of his note-to-note vocal movements in Die Wetterfahne are slowed to an awkward walk. Der Atlas, among several similar instances, is afflicted with wavering sustained notes, and Ständchen is among many of the songs suffering from grayness in a timbre once suffused with color.

But the intelligence is still there, of course, and this set cannot simply be dismissed for its vocal inadequacies. Lieder is more forgiving than opera; brief songs can connect emotionally even when the voice struggles. After a few hearings, I was able to listen past Souzay's rough vocalism to feel that his aging voice appropriately mirrored the terminal melancholy of the texts. Thus, Souzay's last Winterreise becomes the recollections of age sadly reflecting on lost love and its sufferings, a view that nevertheless cannot apply to some of the Schwanengesang songs, which occupy a different textual and emotional terrain. But if this set requires mental adjustments to speed the listener past its deficiencies, it also runs against the reality of a surfeit of fine recordings of these songs, including those of a younger Souzay. Dalton Baldwin's self-effacing accompaniments don't add much to the proceedings, an effect exacerbated by engineering that favors the voice. Testament includes texts and translations, but also unintended humor in Andrè Tubeuf's typically fatuous booklet essay--prose that goes beyond the mere flowery to hothouse stickiness, a giggle-inducing hoot. [2/17/2003]

--Dan Davis