On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music LEADERS IN THE LIED By John Simon Although all cultures have their art songs, the German lied may well be the most famous: I once received a shipment of records addressed to The New...
...The poet who wrote it, Joseph von Eichendorff, was, with Eduard Mörike, one of the twin peaks of German lyric poetry— and here a moonlit night in the countryside is evoked with magnificently restrained imagery and chaste verbal music...
...3 of the second Liederkreis, "Waldesgespräch" (Forest Dialogue) with all the requisite vehemence, and No...
...That, in turn, may have begotten legions of distinguished lieder singers, some also singing in other fields, some specializing in the lied...
...There is a boyishly poetic quality to Bostridge that is most engaging and, to my ears, unique...
...To get back to the ladies, let me extol Angelika Kirchschlager's debut recording of Erich Korngold, Gustav Mahler and Alma Mahler songs (Sony 68344...
...Sing any other kind of music, and there is someone else—the conductor, first violinist, stage director—calling at least some of the shots...
...The poem is one of the loveliest tropes for the calm, confident facing of death, which Schumann's music nudges up a few notches further...
...Goerne looks like a tough guy, a black-leather-wearing skinhead, and his aggressive platform manner includes some, as it were, in-yourface footwork...
...Banse is ideally accompanied by Graham Johnson, who also supplies expert annotations...
...Moving on to more conventional repertoire, we find several great (1 use the word advisedly) male singers...
...These songs are as good as those of Reynaldo Hahn and Charles Koechlin (no mean praise), and approach those of Gabriel Faur...
...Too bad that the English translation given botches the meaning, having a blackbird sing not to the slumbering land, but, solipsistically, to himself...
...Particularly praiseworthy, as sung by Philip Langridge, are 12 settings of poems by Humbert Wolfe (1886-1940), an exquisite minorpoet who had to pay for excessive lifetime success with instant posthumous oblivion...
...What Oelze does supremely well is paint with her voice...
...Equally valuable is Juliane Banse's interpretation of Schumann's so-called women's songs, including the little-known lieder to texts by Elisabeth Kulmann (Hyperion 33103...
...Enter softly," the text by Ferdinand Avenarius begins and ends, and Oelze sings with a rapt understatement that nevertheless makes every syllable, every note, crystalline and explicit...
...Take Christiane Oelze singing Lieder of Anton Webern (DG 447 103), the complete voice-and-piano songs of the last great master of the Second Viennese School...
...39 plus 12 Kerner Lieder, op...
...The young American baritone Nathan Gunn makes a highly promising debut with American Anthem, 22 songs by various composers that includes one of my all-time favorites, Ned Rorem's "Early One Morning' (EMI 73160...
...Kirchschlager sings them rapturously...
...Listen to him singing Benjamin Britten (EMI 56534 and 56183) or Ralph Vaughan Williams (EMI 56762), and seldom has the not-all-that-singable English language issued more mellifluously from a human mouth...
...The way Oelze intones that word, there is light, airiness, ecstasy: You see the morning...
...His platform manner is the most arresting since Fischer-Dieskau's, and you feel that whatever he sings is freshly rethought, with new insights even into such beloved favorites as Dichterliebe (EMI 56575) or the much traversed Scluibert Lieder (EMI 56347...
...4, "Die Stille" (Quietude) as mirthfully as is decently possible, he rises sublimely to the challenge of No...
...With Quasthoff and the no less amazing Anne Sofie Von Otter, not to mention Claudio Abbado magisterially conducting the splendid Berlin Philharmonic superlatively recorded, this may be the definitive version, surpassing (at least in sound) even such epochal discs as Leonard Bernstein's with Christa Ludwig and Walter Berry and George Szell's with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau...
...The last few years have produced a bumper crop of terrific lieder singers...
...Here, however, I am concerned with the songs and Christiane Oelze, whose heartstoppingly pure contribution to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (DG 453 587) will similarly delight...
...24 (Decca485 265), and Liederkreis, op...
...Webern is not the easiest composer, but his orchestral music, say, well conducted by someone like Pierre Boulez—or on the perfect introductory record where Giuseppe Sinopoli conducts, in the needed chronological order, all the orchestral masterworks(Teldec 22902) —is sure to absorb you...
...So in "Heimgang in der Frühe" (Going Home at Dawn), amasterly setting of Detlev von Liliencron's poem, the happily fulfilled lover steps out into the solemnity of morning, the Morgenweihe...
...She is both luminous singer and consummate actress...
...I admired the fourdisc complete Webern by Boulez (SC 45845), but there Heather Harper sings them with a certain unwelcome British reticence...
...Take the baritone Matthias Goenie, who recently came up with two exceptional Robert Schumann discs: Dichterliebe cum Liederkreis, op...
...Christiane Oelze sings like a feeling and thinking nightingale...
...Even if you are as bored by Gustav Hoist's The Planets as I am, you will relish a disc of his—very different— songs (Collins 15322...
...Lied, plural lieder, means simply song, songs...
...Perhaps the surest way to get you started on Bostridge is a brand new recording, The English Songbook (EMI 56830), where he offers a selection from some of the best-loved and some of the most unjustly underrated— or indeed unknown —English composers...
...Many voices are not big enough for opera and the like, but the intelligence and taste of their owners make them shine as recitalists...
...I have them, also, sung by two sopranos and two mezzos with four different accompanists (Orfeo 411 951...
...On Music LEADERS IN THE LIED By John Simon Although all cultures have their art songs, the German lied may well be the most famous: I once received a shipment of records addressed to The New Lieder...
...It is you thinking through every inflection, tempo change, hidden implication—in short, the significance—in every note and word...
...Again, in a chilling setting of a mysterious Stefan George poem, "Ihr tratet zu dem Herde" (You Stepped to the Hearth), where the moonlight is leichenfarb (corpse-colored), Oelze sings the word not only for your ear and eye, but also for your shuddering spine...
...No less recommendable are Songs by Déodat de Séverac (Hyperion 66983), smartly sung by François Le Roux with, again, Graham Johnson's strong accompaniment and abundant annotations...
...Oelze begins with "Vorfrühling" (Early Spring), written when the composer was 15 and already conveying his predilection for brevity and avoidance of loud emphasis...
...I cannot praise enough The Ultimate Collection (BMG 63468), a doubledeckerthat has Björling ravishing us with opera arias and singing five lieder by Schubert, Edvard Grieg and Richard Strauss no less winningly...
...Such was the prestige of the German art song that artists from all over sang it, composers everywhere learned from it...
...Sing art songs, and you are your own boss, despite the odd suggestion you may take from your accompanist...
...A similarly far cry from his somewhat overblown tributes to the pines and fountains of Rome are the songs of Ottorino Respighi (Hungaroton 31795), sung with great dedication by the Hungarian soprano Veronika Kineses...
...But don't be fooled...
...among the women, Christine Schäfer, Juliane Banse, Anne Sofie Von Otter, Angelika Kirchschlager, and Christiane Oelze...
...Of course, they are not alone, but any CD featuring one of these nine is worth your close attention...
...They are all good, yet none of the singers is a match for Oelze, and the songs are not in chronological order, making it hard to follow Webern's progression from tonal, through atonal, to 12-tone—whether or not one considers that progress...
...The conductor Steuart Bedford is the congenial accompanist...
...I think of the Danish Povla Frijsh (whose small voice and exquisite artistry encompassed 11 languages), the Frenchmen Charles Panzéra and Pierre Bernac, the Swiss Maria Stader, the Dutch Elly Ameling, the Americans Nell Tangeman, Bethany Beardslee, Phyllis Bryn-Julson, and Jan DeGaetani...
...Although he delivers No...
...Among the men some of my favorites are Wolfgang Holzmair, Matthias Goerne, Thomas Quasthoff, and Ian Bostridge...
...And something more...
...Now, if you prefer your art songs with a tenor voice, let me commend to you Ian Bostridge...
...Yet these insights are no mere mannerisms, affectedly idiosyncratic departures from the norm, but true epiphanies...
...35 (Decca 460 797...
...On the Webern CD, flawlessly accompanied by Eric Schneider, she demonstrates that the composer, more than half of whose output involved the voice, had his way with lieder...
...When you hear Goerne sing it with easeful legato and floated pianissimos, your eyes moisten...
...This tradition may have evolved from the body of exceptionally fine folk poetry in German, spurring on poets to emulate it, composers to set much of it to music...
...This record can hold its own against those by Kathleen Ferrier and Janet Baker, to name only two...
...And what of those two stalwarts of opera but geniuses of lied, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Hermann Prey...
...There is no going wrong with a Goerne recording, and the same goes for Thomas Quasthoff, whose Des Knaben Wunderhorn (DG 459 646)—Gustav Mahler's sumptuous orchestral setting of 13 items from the German folk poetry collection Youth's Magic Horn—is as good as orchestral song cycles get...
...So he goes from such important figures as Vaughn Williams, Frederick Delius, Percy Grainger, Peter Warlock, and Gerald Finzi, through the likes of Roger Quilter, Ivor Gurney, Charles Villiers Stanford, Joseph Parry, and Edward German, all the way to Thomas Dunhill, Richard Browne, and Arthur Somervell, who are news to me...
...That is why lieder singers must be keenly intelligent on top of, or before, everything else...
...On to some fascinating yet sparselytrodden byways...
...5, "Mondnacht" (Moonlit Night...
...Especially important are her renderings of five songs by Alma Mahler, whose talent her jealous husband did his best to squelch...
...If I had to pick just one nugget from the vast gold mine of the German lied, it would probably be "Mondnacht...
...Just as major Italian composers until recently had to write operas, so it used to be mandatory for their German-language counterparts to include lieder in their oeuvre...
...Among the aptly set Italian and French poems, there are also two by Shelley...
...Although it is usually Italian operatic tenors who accumulate the greatest encomia, the Immortal Swede Jussi Björlmg was, to my mind, the peer of the greatest Italian, Benjamino Gigli...
...Eichendorff concludes with his soul spreading its wings wide and soaring over the silent lands, as if flying home...
...A lieder singer is also her (or his) own director...
...A fine young tenor, Stephen Tarp, does very well by the neglected songs of Edward MacDowell (Naxos 559032...
...Miss K. is so beautiful and charming that it is a deprivation merely to hear her, delectable as that is...
...A fairly recent arrival on the concert scene, this tall, handsome young Englishman is worldclass in every way, with even a touch of otherworldliness...
Vol. 82 • December 1999 • No. 15
