Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin

This fresh reimagining of The Fair Maid of the Mill—there really is no good translation—with guitar rather than piano supporting the vocalist, could lead you to wonder if the composer was an early 19th-century prototype of the modern singer/songwriter. He wasn’t. Schubert was about five feet tall, overweight, socially awkward, and famously bad at self-promotion; he wasn’t appearing at Vienna Kaffeehausen. But there’s something about hearing the 20 songs that comprise the cycle, supported by the chief instrumental voice of contemporary popular music, that makes the narrative content especially potent. It’s been done before, by tenor Peter Schreier in the 1970s, but this new arrangement by guitarist and composer David Leisner is more effective, in part because the keys required for a baritone happen to be more guitar-friendly. Michael Kelly’s light baritone is perfectly suited to both the lyrical and dramatic demands of the material; the pathos of the penultimate song, “Der Müller und der Bach,” is almost unbearable. The brook—“der Bach”— gets the last word. The realistically scaled yet immediate recording was produced by Judith Sherman, responsible for so many wonderful classical recordings for half a century now.