New Barbara Hannigan lieder cd

[Rach3]

"Vienna :Fin de Siecle "

My first hearing of these works .Know Ms.Hannigan only by reputation , nor in any event able to judge here. Assume she chose wisely with her choice of pianist.Very attractive music and singing to my ear, even though no librettos at hand, nor understand German.The Webern, Berg were particularly striking, but all well worth hearing. Free listening of complete cd here:

https://www.nporadio4.nl/cds/barbara-ha ... -de-siecle

From a Google translation of the Netherlands Radio 4 page :


After the huge success of her GRAMMY Award-winning album, Crazy Girl Crazy, the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is back. On a new cd with her mentor pianist and conductor Reinbert de Leeuw.For this new recital album the duo explores the roots of modern music. Composers who had a musical revolution around 1900: Arnold Schönberg, Hugo Wolf, Anton Webern, Alexander Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler and Alban Berg.

On the CD Vienna: Fin de Siècle Hannigan and de Leeuw present their vision on Vienna at the height of late Romanticism. A time when the music was opulent and most decadent. Sounds on the edge of tonality and full of lascivious beauty. For the composers who can be heard at Vienna: Fin de Siècle, text and song were inseparable.The album gives a beautiful glimpse into the rich and intense moment of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Schoenberg, Vier Lieder, Op.2
Webern, Fünf Lieder nach Gedichten von Richard Dehmel
Berg, Sieben Frühe Lieder
Von Zemlinsky , Lieder, Op.2
Alma Mahler, Fünf Lieder
Wolf, Goethe Lieder

[jbuck919]

A sadly neglected art. You will never hear Lieder on even the most sophisticated classical channel. There are singers who would wish to devote their lives to it, but they also have to eat every day. Webern and Berg were both pupils of Schoenberg, and he wrote about how difficult it was to convince one of them (Webern, I think, though I may be wrong) to get them to compose something other than songs.

Just in case no one knows, the three settings of Mignon and Kennst du das Land by Wolf are all settings of the same poem of Goethe in one form or another. His are far from the only great settings of a great poem.

[John F]

When I was at WHRB I created a half-hour program, "Lieder," devoted to art songs. I didn't know much about them back then, but I had heard Gerald Moore's marvelous illustrated lecture "The Unashamed Accompanist" on Angel Records, and decided that the most effective way to learn more was to have to play a half-dozen Lieder every week, making and reading a literal English translation of each. It was indeed an education, not only in the art of the art song but the art of performing it.

Otherwise, WHRB didn't play many Lieder in its regular programming. Pieces as short as a minute get lost among the symphonies and quartets, and while the song cycles are more manageable (and we did play them), we didn't have many in the station's record library.

Hugo Wolf begins his wonderful "Italian Songbook" with a Lied that never mentions songs but nonetheless is about them (and much else):

Auch kleine Dinge können uns entzücken,
Auch kleine Dinge können teuer sein.
Bedenkt, wie gern wir uns mit Perlen schmücken;
Sie werden schwer bezahlt und sind nur klein.
Bedenkt, wie klein ist die Olivenfrucht,
Und wird um ihre Güte doch gesucht.
Denkt an die Rose nur, wie klein sie ist,
Und duftet doch so lieblich, wie ihr wisst.

Even little things can delight us,
Even little things can be precious.
Think how we gladly adorn ourselves with pearls;
They cost a lot, and yet are small.
Think how small is the olive's fruit
And yet is sought for its goodness.
Just think of the rose, how small it is
And yet smells so lovely, as you know.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9p7_hGHoi0

[Rach3]

I simply had to listen again to the Schoenberg,Webern,Berg tracks this am. Wonderful. A cd I may have to acquire.

[maestrob]

If you love lieder, you must explore Richard Strauss's songs, especially on these two albums:





There is also a disc by Margaret Price out there, but I couldn't find the image.....

[jbuck919]

If you love lieder, you must explore Richard Strauss's songs, especially on these two albums:





There is also a disc by Margaret Price out there, but I couldn't find the image.....

Was he made up to look like Schubert on purpose?

[John F]

For me, Nicolai Gedda was not a top-flight Lieder singer. He had a beautiful voice and fine musicianship, but like Fritz Wunderlich who also had those virtues, he didn't really penetrate into the character of the words as well as the music. Come to think of it, there aren't too many tenors who can measure up against the baritones in this repertoire. Now and then, though...

Walter Legge produced HMV's Hugo Wolf Society albums, recording many of his Lieder. For just three of them he signed Helge Rosvaenge, who delivered this hair-raising performance of "Der Feuerreiter," the fire-rider:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8b8rpdgZ0s

Do you see at the window
there again, that red cap?
Something must be the matter
for it is bobbing up and down.
And what a mob is suddenly
now by the bridge near the field!
Hark! the fire-bell is shrilling:
beyond the hill,
beyond the hill,
there's a fire in the mill!

Look, there he goes, galloping furiously
through the gate - it's the fire-rider
on his horse, a bony nag
like a fire-ladder!
Across the fields, through the smoke and heat
he plunges, and he's already reached his goal!
Over there the bells are pealing,
beyond the hill,
beyond the hill,
there's a fire in the mill!

He who so often smelled fire
from a mile off,
and with a fragment of the holy cross
maliciously conjured the blaze -
woe! from the rafters there grins
the fiend in hellish light.
May God have mercy on your soul!
Beyond the hill,
beyond the hill,
he is raging in the mill!

Not an hour had passed
before the mill was reduced to rubble;
but the bold rider
from that hour was never seen again.
People and wagons in crowds
turn toward home away from all the horror;
and the bell stops ringing:
beyond the hill,
beyond the hill,
it's burning!

Later a miller found a skeleton
together with the cap
upright against the cellar wall
sitting on the mare of bone:
Fire-rider, how coolly
you ride now in your grave!
Hush! there he falls into ashes.
Rest well,
rest well,
down there in the mill!

There's a story about the recording session, told by Gerald Moore who was the accompanist. As he tells it, Rosvaenge wasn't in the mood that day and after two takes there was nothing worth publishing, so Legge sent oug for champagne, the three of them drank up, and this recording was the result.

[jbuck919]

No influence from Schubert's Erlkönig there, or anything. Wolf was one of the last composers I came to terms with. Lieder singers have always loved him, but for a long time I found his settings a bit arbitrary, and then there's the matter that (a) he detested Brahms, who had snubbed him and (b) he only really ever composed songs, which by the standards of all the other great art song composers (except maybe Duparc) would be considered a deficiency.

[John F]

Hugo Wolf was a professional music critic and very much in the Wagner camp. It's ironic, then, that one of his most biting and funny satires is at the expense of critics, "Abschied" (goodbye). Many a singer has offered this to the public, including any critics in the audience, as the last encore. The difference between him and Eduard Hanslick is that Wolf was also a great composer, in my view anyway. That his lasting music was in shorter forms, i.e. the song, is neither here nor there; the same is true of most of Chopin's music, whose greatness surely nobody disputes any more.

Wolf's opera "Der Corregidor" is occasionally revived as an act of piety - Bruno Walter conducted it at the 1936 Salzburg Festival, and there have been good recordings one of which I've heard - but it just doesn't work, and while some other pieces such as the Italian Serenade for string quartet have their appeal, they are very few. Wolf knew what he was best at and mostly stuck to it, fortunately for us. He died insane at 43, a sad loss to music.

Not the least of Wolf's virtues as a songwriter is that he was discriminating and sophisticated in his choice of poets and poems, as Schumann (also a critic) was but Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler and Strauss were not. The chief virtue of a song text is that it inspires the composer to create, but once the song is written, the quality of the poem enhances or diminishes the quality of the song. Wolf was not a snob; two of his largest song collections are settings of Italian and Spanish folk and popular lyrics in German translation. He also provided some of the most remarkable and challenging piano accompaniments in the song literature, comparable with Schumann's.

Oh yes, "Abschied" :


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LHXWBT3-f8

Without knocking, a gentleman comes visiting me evening:
"I have the honor to be your critic!"
Immediately he takes the light in his hand,
gazes long at my shadow on the wall,
stepping close and then stepping back: "Now, my good young man,
kindly see how your nose looks from the side!
You must admit that it is a protuberance."
This? So it is! My word! I never imagined - my whole life long -
that such a world-champion nose I bore on my face!

The man said various other things about this and that,
on my honour, I remember no more;
perhaps he thought I should confess to him.
Finally he stood up and I lit his way out.
As we stood at the top of the stairs
I gave him, quite cheerfully,
a little kick on the backside.
Wow! what a jolting, tumbling, and hobbling!
The like I have never seen,
my whole life long,
of a man going so quickly down the stairs!

[jbuck919]

Well of course Chopin also wrote songs, and I don't mean juvenilia. The person known to Garrett (IcedNote) and myself was something of a prodigy and his first love as a boy was Chopin. He played everything by him, but his greatest regret was that he could not understand the Polish, which of course neither can I.

[John F]

Fortunately for your friend and you, Liszt made excellent arrangements of six Chopin songs for solo piano. And of course a recording of Chopin's songs should include their texts and translations, though I don't know whether this is standard with CDs.

Liszt composed some excellent songs himself, more than the three Petrarch sonnets known in his piano arrangement. Shopping in the Greenwich Village store called Discophile, a great resource for record collectors until it was driven out of business by Tower Records nearby, I came across a 10" Ducretet-Thomson LP of some Liszt songs beautifully sung by Gerard Souzay. Eventually Fischer-Dieskau got around to recording all of them (of course), but the Souzay record remains unsurpassed.