Brahms: Fruhlingslied, Op. 85, No. 5

Lenneke Ruiten is quickly establishing herself as one of the leading sopranos of her generation. She started her tuition with Maria Rondel en Meinard Kraak in The Hague, and subsequently took lessons with Elle Ameling, Robert Holl, Hans Hotter, Walter Berry and Robert Tear.

Her breakthrough came with winning the International Vocalist Competition of ¡¥s Hertogenbosch. She sang in all the important opera houses of Europe, and with conductors like Gardiner, Bruggen, Biondi, Koopman, Dantone.

In 2011 she made her Salzburger Festspiele debut in Die Frau ohne Schatten conducted by Christian Thielemann. This well chosen selection of Brahms songs shows her warm timbre, her wide range of colours and her complete understanding of the text.

‘You sing as if you had written it yourself!’ Jean Cocteau once told Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. This anthology of lieder by Brahms and Schumann is a prime example of the great singer doing just that, mining every nuance of emotion from a song while, at the same time, sounding as spontaneous and free as if he were making it up on the spot. One of the hallmarks of Fischer-Dieskau’s legacy is the ease with which he creates the spell of each individual song, drawing the listener – apparently effortlessly – into the drama created by the words and the music.

Fischer-Dieskau recorded extensively for Deutsche Grammophon, and the bulk of his archive has been mined on CDs. These recordings, however, are rarities. The songs on CD1 appeared only as part of the Fischer-Dieskau Edition for his 75th birthday. The Brahms songs on CD2 make their first appearance on CD. And the 1957 recording of Schumann’s Dichterliebe with his long-time pianist Jörg Demus, only appeared as part of Deutsche Grammophon’s centenary edition. CD2 includes the Four Duets, Op. 28 in which Fischer-Dieskau is partnered by an artist not heard enough on records, the contralto Kerstin Meyer.

This release marks the launch of an Eloquence series of notable recitals of songs and opera arias by some of the great voices of Decca and Deutsche Grammophon.

These releases from the archives of the RIAS and the Sender Freies Berlin document the unequalled quantitative and qualitative spectrum which baritone Fischer-Dieskau acquired during the five decades of his career.

They offer a fascinating insight into the breadth of his repertoire as well as his artistic approach, with which he maintained a careful balance of development and continuity until the end. These recordings – spanning Beethoven’s sacred songs Op. 48 of 1806, through Schumann, Brahms, Mahler and Reger, to Heinrich Sutermeister’s expressive psalm setting of 1948 – demonstrate the essential Fischer-Dieskau.

Not only do they document the artistic partnership with pianists such as Hertha Klust, Daniel Barenboim, Cord Garben, Aribert Reimann and Tamás Vásáry, but also the delightful collaboration with the organist Ulrich Bremsteller.

Furthermore, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau can be heard together with his wife and musical partner, Julia Varady. This is a documentary edition both in the sense of a historic and an artistic legacy: it reveals the riches of lieder from the last two centuries which Fischer-Dieskau, in his role of musical chronicler, made accessible for the present age; and it is an impressive record of an incomparable interpretational art, according to which word and music were always treated and realised as a unit.