Mahler: Rückert-Lieder (5 songs, complete)

Marilyn Horne's plum-tinged mezzo and the music of Mahler are inseparable. So far, only the Fahrenden Gesellen songs and the Kindertotenlieder have made their way to CD (now deleted), so it is appropriate to collect on a single CD, the three masterpieces all performed by the same artist. The Ruckert-Lieder make their first appearance on CD.

Transcriptions which got to the heart of the sheet music’s technicality and spirit were essential to reveal its core substance. One also needed first rate musicians to transpose its rich orchestral colours. It is fair to say that listeners will find all this in this interpretation by Dame Felicity Lott and the members of the Schumann Quartet.

If You Love For Beauty, showcases Metropolitan Opera and GRAMMY® Award-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, and The Colburn Orchestra conducted by Yehuda Gilad. The recording includes Mahler’s “Rückert-Lieder,” the aria Am I in Your Light? from Doctor Atomic by John Adams, Chausson’s sweeping Poème de l'amour et de la mer, all with full orchestra, and two Handel arias, Scherza infida and Ombra mai fu performed with chamber orchestra. The members of The Colburn Orchestra create a distinct orchestral sound (a great one), and Maestro Gilad elicits sensitive and lyrical interpretations of the repertoire.

This recording won the Audio Oasis Award even before it was released, at THE SHOW in Newport, 2012.

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.

A native of Québec, Marie-Nicole Lemieux gained international attention in 2000 when she won both the Prix de la Reine Fabiola and the Prix du Lied in Belgium. She has given recitals across Europe, Canada and the United States. The American pianist Daniel Blumenthal performs an encyclopaedic repertoire and has premiered many works, including the Debussy Piano Trio.

These recordings taken from the legendary Capriccio-Archive bring some of the world’s leading singers together.

The Austrian mezzo-soprano Hermine Haselböck, winner of the Vienna Musikverein's Alexander Zemlinsky Prize, sings three of Gustav Mahler's great song cycles, accompanied by pianist Russell Ryan. Hermine Haselböck's other Bridge CDs include Lieder by Franz Schreker with baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and pianist Russell Ryan, BRIDGE9259); and Lieder by Alexander Zemlinsky (with pianist Florian Henschel, BRIDGE9244).

Swedish Mezzo-soprano and former winner of BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, Katarina Karnéus is joined on this disc by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki to perform three of Gustav Mahler’s orchestral songs.

As a composer, Gustav Mahler was absorbed by song and symphony as complementary genres deeply involved with each other. In his first symphony, Mahler included two themes from the song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, originally scored for voice and piano, which he had recently composed to his own poems. It was perhaps the experience of orchestrating these themes in his symphony that a few years later inspired Mahler to create the version for voice and orchestra.

All of the songs in Kindertotenlieder and Rückert-Lieder are settings of poems by the poet Friedrich Rückert, composed between 1901 and 1904. For Kindertotenlieder (Songs of the death of children) Mahler chose five of more than four hundred poems written by Rückert in reaction to the death of his two children: poems of despair, disbelief and resignation.

While Kindertotenlieder was conceived as a cycle, the Rückert-Lieder are more loosely connected with each other and they include some of the most sublime Mahlerian moments, for instance in Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.