Mahler: Ablösung im Sommer (Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit)

Bo Skovus is considered to be one of the top Lieder interpreters of his generation.

This Danish baritone is a star of the Vienna State Opera.

He performs with the leading opera houses and orchestras in Europe, America and Japan.

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.

New York recital debut, February 28th 1971

‘What strikes me, in performing this programme, is of course its intrinsic musical (and not merely ethnomusicological) value and its richness; but also its expression of a folk imagination whose themes are far removed from the preoccupations of the loquacious poetasters who inhabited the Romantic salons. The great majority of the poems set to music here - which are often anonymous, since they are directly derived from oral tradition - deal with frustrated love, arranged marriages, mothers mourning their sons killed in battle, harvests too poor to nourish the family, betrothed couples ardently awaiting their union; here too is nature with its succession of mysteries and symbols. These songs contain a whole universe of piety, fatalism and superstition, sometimes recounted with an amused distance; they express both fabled folk wisdom and a poetic lyricism in resonance with the elements: in short, all of “earthly life” is there’ Salomé Haller