Wolf, H: Er ist's (No. 6 from Mörike-Lieder)

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

This is the first disc in a series that will be the first ever complete edition of the songs of Hugo Wolf. These performances were recorded live at the Oxford Lieder Festival (in the Holywell Music Room) on 22nd October 2010.

“Since her full blooming on the operatic stage, Kirchschlager’s mezzo has grown enormously - and her performing character with it. She still knows how to hold a recital audience in the palm of her hand, but now there’s a newly expansive energy firing all she sings […..] Kirchschlager’s dark mezzo smouldered with sensuality,” so wrote the Times after Angelika Kirchschlager and Roger Vignoles’ February 2010 Wigmore Hall performance of the same collection of Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss songs.

Angelika Kirchschlager is regarded as one of the most distinguished mezzo-sopranos of her generation and in particular is recognised internationally for her interpretations of Richard Strauss. She gives regular solo recitals, balancing her operatic career with lieder performances. Eminent piano accompanist and leading authority on the song repertoire, Roger Vignoles, is her long-standing musical partner.

Now in this collection Kirchschlager and Vignoles collaborate to perform nine Strauss songs as well as Wolf’s lieder to texts by Eduard Mörike and Gottfried Keller. Wolf set 43 of Mörike’s poems to music during a period of intense creativity in which he developed a heady new musical language. Kirchschlager delights in the opportunity to convey this with glorious colouring of phrases which are fittingly matched by the piano. The recording provides encores of music from each composer, including Strauss’ triumphant ‘Nichts,’ a fitting end to a compelling programme.

Two of the world’s most seasoned Schubertians, both long associated with Wigmore Hall, come together for the next new release from Wigmore Hall Live.

Live from Wigmore Hall - 19 February 2008

This recording comprises 26 of the 53 lieder that Wolf wrote on the poems of Eduard Mörike, born just seven years after Schubert in 1804, but outliving the composer nearly five decades.

Reviewing the concert in Seen & Heard International stated that: “The partnership between Cooper and Holzmair is so close, it’s almost symbiotic”

“Rarely have I heard so sensitive, intelligent and gloriously musical a partnership. No-one could have asked for more attentive, detailed expressions nor more complete harmony of feeling between singer and pianist … I was transfixed by the sheer artistry.” (The Independent)

Wolfgang Holzmair is a native of Upper Austria, and the British pianist Imogen Cooper, whose training included a period in Vienna studying with Paul Badura-Skoda, Jörg Demus and Alfred Brendel.

Although Lisa Della Casa sang in many operas in Salzburg, she gave only a single lieder recital: in 1957 in the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum, accompanied by the Hungarian pianist Arpad Sándor, esteemed chamber music partner of musicians such as Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz.Anyone who had not expected lieder to be a speciality of this lyric soprano would soon be disabused: with the incomparable clarity and simplicity of her melodic line and her precise and unaffected articulation, Lisa Della Casa excelled with touchstones of the repertoire by Schubert and Brahms. She also honoured her compatriot Othmar Schoeck (who had died the previous spring) with her performance of two lieder from his new setting of Goethe's singspiel libretto Erwin und Elmire. She also included in her programme three of the Chansons populaires by Ravel, 1957 being the 20th anniversary of his death. Naturally, she concluded her recital with a group of lieder by Richard Strauss, the composer with whose works her name is still most associated.A unique delight made available to the modern audience thanks to this Orfeo recording.