Gramophone Magazine Editor's Choice

“Captivating playing” of “exceeding beauty and refinement” have earned the previous volumes of Noriko Ogawa's Debussy cycle the highest recommendations, including no less than two Editor's Choice in Gramophone.

“Every bar of these performances confirms Ogawa as a most elegant, scrupulously sensitive interpreter of 'music like a dream from which one draws away the veil' (Debussy). She achieves a magical transparency throughout Book 1 of the Préludes with her refined pedalling and cool command of texture and colour. In 'Voiles' she makes you readily recall Cortot's heady description of 'the flight of the white wing on the crooning sea toward the horizon bright with the setting sun' while maintaining her own individuality. Her hushed start before the start of the whirling tarantella in 'Les collines d'Anacapri' is one of many haunting touches; and her playing of 'Des pas sur la neige', the Arctic centre of Book 1 of the Préludes, suggests some ultimate desolation. In Children's Corner she never turns 'Doctor Gradus', marked modérémentanimé, into a glittering presto and finds time to convey its mix of guile and sophistication. You could hardly find a more skilful or sympathetic artist from a younger generation. BIS's demonstration sound quality crowns this superb issue.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“This reading of Schubert's cycle is confirmation, as if that were needed, of Jochen Kupfer's beautiful singing, and even more of his gifts as a Lieder interpreter. Kupfer's voice and style is highly reminiscent of Wolfgang Holzmair's, but his technique is just that shade firmer and his voice more youthful than the older baritone's with Imogen Cooper, recalling rather Holzmair's first (1983) recording on Preiser. Both artists have a tenor-like quality to their voices, coming near to some ideal for the work. Kupfer begins with the basic verities of immaculate line and imaginative phrasing, to which he adds a complete identification with the youthful lover's aspirations and eventual disappointment and tragedy.
This lad sets out with a spring in his heels and a smile in his voice, quite avoiding any sense of despondency from the outset. All is going to be well in his wooing. That's conveyed in the first few songs with fresh immediacy as though the poetic emotions and their setting were newminted.
The arrival of the unwanted and aggressive hunter provokes an almost breathless jealousy and, in that arresting song, 'Die liebe Farbe', an appropriately mesmeric, plaintive approach.
From there on the downward curve of emotional feeling, so arrestingly depicted in the words and music, finds in Kupfer and his alert partner an answering mood of despair, the raw and anguished passion in those final three songs fully achieved. All the while you feel the disillusionment and pathos in the texture and verbal acuity of the interpretation.
With a finely balanced recording to add to one's pleasure, this is a performance among baritones to place very near the top of the pile, if not at its apex, and it challenges even the prevailing tenor recommendations, the versions by Ian Bostridge and Werner Güra.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010