An die musik: Schubert songs and piano transcriptions.

Kevin McMillan, baritone, & Paul Stewart, piano. CBC Records MVCD 1106.

THESE ARE BOTH PERFECTLY ADEQUATE recordings by accomplished artists, but in neither is the repertoire of sufficient originality or interest to mark these recitals as necessary. They both strike me as examples of rather soft programming aspirations.

Gerald Finley's star is rapidly ascendant internationally, and rightly so. His is a well-cultivated baritone, centered and sympathetic, which he uses with intelligence and affecting candor. But it isn't a force-of-nature instrument like Bryn Terfel's, for instance, and Terfel just recently recorded Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel to overwhelming effect. Finley wisely doesn't even attempt to compete with that kind of vocal amplitude; his approach is more intimate and inward. But there is no question that Terfel has these songs in a "lock" for this generation, and one questions the wisdom of following those massive footsteps. Couldn't less travelled repertoire have been considered? Britten's British and Irish folk-song arrangements are also scarcely a rare commodity, though Finley's singing, with Stephen Ralls' buoyant accompaniment, is very pleasing. The only unhackneyed music on this CD is Derek Holman's 1986 song cycle The Centered Passion, featuring six of Tennyson's In Memoriam poems. The settings are, for the most part, dark and burdened, with little emotional expansion, but they are certainly of interest as a contemporary vocal selection, and Finley delivers their power.

For anyone not yet inundated with Schubert tributes from 1997's 200th anniversary of his birth, the CBC disc An die Musik combines Kevin McMillan's slightly foursquare performance of some of the "greatest hits"--An die Musik, Die Forelle, Erlkonig--with Paul Stewart's lyrical performances of piano transcriptions of these and other songs made by Liszt, Alfred, Cortot, Leopold Godowsky and Gerald Moore. There is an unwonted tightness in McMillan's upper register on occasion here, and with some stirring exceptions, this isn't his finest hour of lieder. Paul Stewart, by contrast, charms with the flow and singing tone of his pianism. It's curious that Gerald Moore's piano transcription of An die Musik should be so much more moving than the original, but that's the case here.

--Urjo Kareda