Anna Fraser & Neal Peres Da Costa | Schubert: Schwanengesang
Deux-Elles DXL1231 – released July 2026
Love, longing and loss have inspired composers for centuries, but few explored the emotional landscape of the human heart more profoundly than Franz Schubert. His songs inhabit a world where babbling brooks carry messages to absent lovers, spring breezes awaken desire, distant towns become symbols of grief and memory and a faithful carrier pigeon ultimately reveals itself to be something far more elusive: Sehnsucht – that uniquely German yearning for something forever beyond reach.
This remarkable recording from soprano Anna Fraser and scholar-pianist Neal Peres Da Costa reimagines Schubert’s Schwanengesang not as a museum piece, but as audiences may once have encountered it in an intimate nineteenth-century Schubertiad. Interspersed with three songs from Johann Anton André’s Lieder und Gesänge, the program unfolds as an emotional journey rather than simply a posthumously assembled collection.
Fraser’s singing is fearless. Drawing on nineteenth-century vocal techniques explored through the Australian Research Council project The Shock of the Old, she constantly varies colour, register and vocal timbre in response to the poetry. It is a powerful dramatic language. Her German diction is exemplary, every word delivered with clarity and expressive intent.
The recording’s real revelation, however, is Peres Da Costa’s playing on a replica c.1819 Conrad Graf fortepiano. Its transparent, intimate sound transforms familiar songs. In Liebesbotschaft (Message of Love), Schubert’s murmuring brook ripples effortlessly beneath the voice, while Ständchen (Serenade) lingers with exquisite flexibility, the nightingale calls emerging naturally from the accompaniment. Elsewhere, the instrument darkens dramatically: the ominous weight of Aufenthalt (Sojourn), the suspended stillness of Am Meer (By the Sea) and the haunting psychological landscape of Der Doppelgänger (The Dopperlganger) demonstrate an astonishing palette of colour. The piano at times sounds harp-like to my ear as though the strings were strummed rather than hammered – sublime.
Throughout, words remain paramount and I would encourage any listener to have the translations of the poetry at hand to ponder over as these short beauties unfold. As the excellent booklet explains, Peres Da Costa draws on Liszt’s transcriptions, historical treatises and early recordings to shape tempo, articulation, pedalling and phrasing, allowing music and poetry to become inseparable. The accompanying essays and complete texts with English translations are a great read, offering genuine insight into both the scholarship and the emotional world of the songs.
By the final song, Die Taubenpost (The Carrier Pigeon), Schubert offers no tidy resolution. Love remains unfulfilled, grief endures, and yet hope persists. The faithful carrier pigeon is revealed to be Sehnsucht itself: longing as life’s constant companion. Fraser and Peres Da Costa have created far more than an historically informed performance. They have invited us to hear these extraordinary songs as living theatre, where research serves expression and every phrase feels newly discovered.
