Mozart: Ridente la calma, K152

Multi-award winning opera singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, praised for the ‘pristine beauty of her lyric soprano’ (The Guardian), was revered in opera houses worldwide and is perhaps most famous for her Mozart roles. However, she was also at home on the concert stage and this collection combines her acclaimed portrayals of Donna Elvira, Countess Almaviva and Richard Strauss’s Marschallin, among others, with her affecting interpretations of lieder and song-cycles.

A new and exquisite collection of German songs from counter-tenor Andreas Scholl, providing a perfect balance between text and music. The choice of music reflects Scholl’s belief that music need not be confined in performance to a particular voice type, as long as “the singer’s approach is true.”

Scholl pulls off a bravura display in Schubert’s An Mignon, singing in both the counter-tenor and baritone register. The performance of these songs reveals an intuitive understanding between singer and accompanist, Andreas Scholl and Tamar Halperin.

Mozart created masterpieces in virtually all the established genres. We know him as symphonist, writer of a great many concertos, especially for piano, and a unique and very productive opera composer. His sublime chamber music was written for numerous ensembles, and he composed dozens of the most beautiful serenades and divertimentos. But as a lied composer he is perhaps rather neglected, perhaps because in the minds of many music lovers the German lied is a phenomenon that came into being with Franz Schubert some decades after Mozart’s death in 1791. In fact, Mozart wrote about thirty lieder, fourteen of which were published during his lifetime. It is hardly too much to say that he was also the most important lied composer of his day.

The soprano Gemma Bertagnolli compares the music of Mozart to a country; “I feel welcome in this place of grandeur and miniature, of rigour and frivolity, of love and terror, of truth and jest.” She performs these works with passionate elegance.

Mozart’s songs are surprisingly varied in many ways. Although there isn’t a great number of them, they date from all periods of the composer’s short life and are widely diverse in character, from simple strophic charmers such as ‘Komm, lieber Mai’ (Sehnsucht nach dem Frühlinge) to extended and intensely serious utterances such as those he wrote for the Freemasons (Die ihr des unermesslichen Weltalls, from Eine kleine deutsche Kantate). They also vary in language: most are in German but he also set French and Italian texts.

All are represented here, sung by two of Britain’s most popular and outstanding singers.

Despite the substantial number of Lieder written for voice and piano in the 19th century, the guitar was also used occasionally as an accompaniment -- it was Berlioz's first instrument, and Schubert composed a number of Lieder for guitar and voice, considering himself a guitarist first and a pianist second. Therefore, while the three sets of German Songs by Louis Spohr on this recording were composed originally for piano and voice in 1816--1826, with editions for guitar appearing shortly after the original publications, we can be sure that Spohr would have approved of these arrangements.

The Mozart songs included on this disc were also originally composed for piano, with the exception of K351 and K349, which were written for mandolin accompaniment. Three of the songs were transcribed for guitar by Wenzeslaus Matiega (1773--1830) a Bohemian who was based in Vienna.

Mozart was Spohr's idol, so it is fitting that these two composers' songs have been programmed together to create a unique and complementary programme.

Mozart loved the human voice, which he used as an instrument of musical expression throughout his compositional career from the age of six or seven. His Lieder, written largely in response to requests and commissions from acquaintances, friends and publishers deal with everyday subjects such as friendship and romance but also with social and political occasions such as the Emperor Joseph II’s Turkish campaign. Some were written in connection with Mozart’s activities as a freemason. Only one, the bitter-sweet Das Veilchen (The Violet) is set to the words of a major poet, Goethe. The many miniature masterpieces to be heard on this recording include Komm, liebe Zither, komm (Come, dear Zither), a musical precursor, with mandolin accompaniment, of Don Giovanni’s serenade Deh vieni alla finestra, the idyllic Der Zauberer (The Sorcerer) and the dramatically graphic Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte (When Louisa burned the letters of her unfaithful lover).

Ute Ziemer was a pupil of the late Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. “Only five days before her death we worked together at her home in Schruns in Austria on lieder by Schubert, and I hope that these recordings would have received her smiling ‘thumbs-up’ …her greatest mark of approval.”