May 16: Sacred Songs (Peter Schreier, tenor; Karl Richter and Ton Koopman, harpsichord)

With a top ten list to annoy everybody

Here at “Year of Bach,” we’re not afraid of courting controversy. So without further ado, here are the Ten Best Singers of the 20th Century, in alphabetical order: 

1. Sam Cooke

2. Bob Dylan

3. Ella Fitzgerald

4. Billie Holiday

5. Michael Jackson

6. Joni Mitchell

7. Paul McCartney

8. Freddy Mercury

9. Thomas Quasthoff

10. Peter Schreier

Sorry Aretha, Bessie, Bing, Elvis, Elvis, Frank, John, Lorraine, Louis, Luciano, Otis, Perry, Prince, and Tony. (Celebrate my taste / start a fight in the comments — also: I’ve shaken the hand of one of these 10, care to guess?)

Singers nine and ten, I recognize, are much less well known than the others.

I was fortunate to see Quastoff perform three times in New York. (He retired in 2012.) His voice booms with an enigmatic color that’s both warm and foreboding. His extraordinary instrument is especially well suited to the art songs of Schubert and Schumann. (Quasthoff is also profoundly physically disabled — an extraordinary life story.) Here he is singing Schubert’s “Ständchen” with an orchestral accompaniment:

Longtime readers know how much I’ve enjoyed exploring the catalog of the German tenor Peter Schreier (1935-2019). I’ll never get to hear him live. He regularly came through New York while I was living there, but I didn’t know what I was missing.

As a taste test, here’s Peter singing that same Schubert song with characteristic clarity, precision, grace, and gravity. He’s accompanied on piano by Austin Powers Rudolf Buchbinder.

What a pleasure to listen to Peter sing. He’s friendly, but he’ll grab you by the lapels. He’s a counselor and a mentor. The beauty of the upper part of his vocal register is unmatched — what a loss to the world that it’s now gone. He recorded lots of Bach, and his performances have been easy for me to choose as I survey the canon.

Peter Schreier, left, with Karl Richter

I was not familiar with Bach’s songs and arias for voice and keyboard, so I was pleased to see that Schreier and his frequent collaborator Karl Richter recorded twenty of them in 1981, shortly before Richter’s death. (YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music.)

Schreier also recorded a mostly overlapping second set in 1991 with Ton Koopman on organ and Jaap Ter Linden on cello. (These can be found most easily on tracks 116 to 147 in a collection of Koopman’s works. (Youtube, Spotify, Apple Music; BWV 441, 443, 445, 446, 447, 449, 450, 452, 453, 460, 461, 466, 469, 475, 478, 479, 482, 487, 493, 495, 506, 507.))

These recordings are both excellent, the general high quality from JSB and Schreier you’d expect. Because of the stripped down instrumentation, I baselessly anticipated that these songs would sound more like Schubert and Schumann. But no, these aren’t art songs as much as they are offshoots of the cantatas. While there’s plenty of good music to dig, you won’t find any lovesick Werthers shooting themselves on account of their broken herzen. (I do love all those wailing losers.)

To the Bach! Highlights below.

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One of Bach’s great melodies opens BWV 487, and the bridge starting at 0:39 is a pleasant surprise:

The melody of BWV 507 is close to a Platonic ideal, pure breathing:

Schreier gets increasingly tender into the last measures of BWV 446:

The standout piece for me in this collection is BWV 506. The narrator inquires like a caring parent, just a gorgeous performance. Look at the score — there’s nothing fancy going on, but so much beauty in these open lines. The penultimate measure reminds me of melodies from synagogue:

More delicate beauty in BWV 493 “O Jesus, so sweet…”:

Schreier is effortless going high in his register for BWV 449:

Queue the tissues for the opening of BWV 460, “Be thou contented.” Special praise to Karl Richter’s delicate organ work.

Thanks, Peter & Karl, wherever and whatever you are now.

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Bonus non-Bach 20th century incredible singer you probably don’t know:

Paul Foster was Sam Cooke’s bandmate in the gospel group The Soul Stirrers. Here he is singing “He’s Been a Shelter for Me,” in 1963. By this point, Cooke had left the group to become a secular superstar. But after watching this video, I’m left thinking that Sam Cooke, the greatest singer of American soul music, wasn’t even the greatest singer in his own band.