Should a woman even think about singing Schubert’s Winterreise, a song cycle whose poems and music are almost indelibly in a man’s voice? Several have attempted it, most have failed, with perhaps Brigitte Fassbaender as a worthy exception. Christine Schäfer would not leap to most minds in connection with this dark music, a voice recently described as “boyish and dulcet.” Schäfer’s success at the venture may not come across quite so favorably on her recently released recording (you can hear the 20th song, Der Wegweiser, at the moment as the background sound at her Web site) as it did in her Vocal Arts Society recital on Wednesday night at the Austrian Embassy.

After thorough listening, it may be easy to conclude that Winterreise is a baritone’s cycle, although the composer’s original choice of key was tailored to a tenor. The shift of registers in many of the songs seems to fit best with the baritone, able to growl in the basement and roar or purr at the heights of the voice. With treble voices, the higher passages risk becoming too ethereal or too overbearing, depending on the interpretative choice, and the bottom gets lost (as it did at times with Schäfer, although the acoustic of the Austrian Embassy generally saved her).

What makes the best performances of the cycle is that they capture the gloom of the narrator’s sadness (“Now the world is so bleak,” he announces in the first song). Rejected in love, he leaves behind his beloved’s house and village, trudging through the snow, haunted by memories that come back as snatches of major-mode melody, shunning society and hoping to find the signpost that leads him toward death. Schäfer drained her voice of most of its chaleur, not making her tone so icy as to be uninteresting or brittle but so that it glistened in an introspective way, like the whispering of the narrator through his chattering teeth.