This selection of songs could carry the subtitle ‘Women in Love’. ‘L’Education sentimentale’, perhaps. Ailish Tynan and Iain Burnside have assembled a portrait gallery: a whole bevy of Schubert’s women pursuing different sorts of love, nurturing different Biedermeier dreams.
Goethe’s Gretchen finds an intriguing counterpart in Schiller’s Amalia. Ellen gazes out over Loch Katrine, while Serafina looks down affectionately at her fortepiano. A young nun welcomes her destiny as the bride of Christ. This, the first volume in Burnside’s carefully crafted voyage of Schubert song, sees Ailish at the height of her powers, in music that has been her ‘life’s dream’ to record.