There's an old belief system that singers who do well in opera can't sing lieder and vice versa. Not true -- Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Hans Hotter, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau are just some of the names that come up when you think of singers that put the lie to that myth. Nevertheless, many singers do gravitate toward one or the other; louder singers tend to do better on the stage than in the more intimate setting of the lied. One name that you can add to the stellar pantheon above is that of German tenor Leo Slezak, father to actor Walter Slezak who probably had his most representative turn as Willy in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), though he is perhaps best remembered as the Clock King in the Batman television series. The elder Slezak also had a late career in film, playing the avuncular uncle in Viennese musical comedies in the 1930s -- his singing career, however, began in Brünn in Lohengrin in 1896. He is also remembered as the tenor who once asked, "When is the next swan?" when mistakenly passed up by a swan in a production of Lohengrin, adding an exceptional tidbit to the annals of apocryphal opera lore.
Slezak made many records in a recording career that stretched from 1902 to 1942, a span only matched by commercial record singers like Billy Murray. Slezak has been the subject of several CD reissues of varying quality, and in 2007, all of them were focused on his operatic literature. Symposium's An Anthology of Song, Vol. 3: Leo Slezak is probably the first to focus entirely on Slezak's work as a singer of lieder, and it's hard to imagine there would be a finer representation of his gifts than what is offered here. Symposium's transfers are very honest representations of originals that are in generally very good shape and range from 1913 to 1929, though most of the items are electrical. The acoustical recordings are quieter and not juiced up, but it is the electrical performances that attract one's ear; there is no discernable decline in the fifty-something tenor's voice, and his delivery of softer songs -- Schubert's "Nach und Träume," Brahms' "Feldeinsmakeit" -- are captivating. He performs a good swath of mainstream German repertoire -- Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Liszt, and Loewe, plus Grieg in translation and, in a nod to French literature, Reynaldo Hahn's "Paysage." There are, of course, some vagaries here and there -- variable recording quality and some tinkly sounding pianos mainly. Apart from this, once you are past the antique sound, An Anthology of Song, Vol. 3: Leo Slezak is almost like listening to these songs sung by a good modern singer, with the whole weight of history behind him, except that with Slezak the "history" is that of the nineteenth century. It makes for excellent time travel and for those with a taste for great voices from the distant past, An Anthology of Song, Vol. 3: Leo Slezak will make you hope that the "next swan" doesn't come too soon.
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