Product Review

This first volume of Song on Record, devoted to Lieder, provides a critical guide to performance on record from the early days of the gramophone to the present day. Alan Blyth, with a team of distinguished writers and critics, has covered comprehensively the main strands of each composer's output in the field, from Haydn and Mozart to Schoenberg and Berg, together with illuminating and entertaining discussion of the differing interpretations found on the selected recordings. The book is thus as much a history of the Lied and its interpretation as a guide to available recordings and will be of interest to musicologists and performers as well as to music lovers and record collectors.