Brahms: Feldeinsamkeit, Op. 86 No. 2

At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the interest of composers for a cappella choir music seemed to be weak. When composers like Mahler and Debussy wrote for choir, they mostly included them into orchestral works. In the 1960s Ligeti opened up new perspectives with his piece for choir Lux aeterna and Gottwald’s transcriptions refer to Ligeti’s work, by applying the technique of writing for voices which gives us ultimately better understanding of contemporary choral music.

‘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.

For many years, Barbara Hendricks has been communicating her love of the lied in concerts and on disc. After Schumann, Schubert, Beethoven, Spanish songs and those of Poulenc, it is the turn of Brahms to find sublimation in this disc from the Swedish soprano, magnificently accompanied on the piano by her partner Roland Pöntinen and recorded between 2002-7.

Brahms composed more than 200 lieder throughout his career, though for the most part between 1851 and 1888. In the choice of texts he was generally guided by the climate or message of a poem, more than by its formal perfection; it was no doubt for this reason that he set very little Goethe to music, whose poems, he said, “are all so accomplished that music cannot be added to them”. His favourite theme was, naturally enough, love, in all its forms, whether evoking joy, optimism or nostalgia, loss, resignation, memory… One finds in these lieder authentic, personal experiences of Johannes Brahms. Caught between romanticism and classicism, he offered in his lieder music that is individual and consummate.

For this new recording on Capriccio mother and son unite. For more than fifteen years Renate Behle has been one of the world’s most outstanding interpreters of dramatic roles. With her “warm, sumptuous, full voice” whose “sound is etched in one’s memory” (Financial Times), she has thrilled audiences and critics alike on nearly every major opera stage in the world. Here she performs a recital of works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Beethoven and Brahms amongst others, with her son Daniel, a tenor in great demand on the major opera and concert stages of the world.

Cellist Zuill Bailey's 2010 recording of J.S. Bach's Suites for Solo Cello (TEL3197802) went straight to the top of the Billboard classical chart. His new Telarc album is devoted to the music of Brahms, and includes the Sonatas in E minor, opus 38 and F major, opus 99 alongside several rarely-recorded song transcriptions. Bailey’s musical partner here is his longtime friend, the pianist Awadagin Pratt.

Zuill Bailey made his Telarc debut with Russian Masterpieces for Cello early in 2009, a disc which featured music by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Towards the end of last year he joined forces with pianist Simone Dinnerstein in a critically acclaimed recording of Beethoven’s Complete Works for Piano and Cello. Since then his recording of J S Bach’s cello suites has been a massive success particularly in the USA where it spent four weeks in a row at No. 1 on the Billboard classical chart, and even made the Top 30 in the New Artists chart.

Along with Brahms’ Cello Sonatas in E Minor and F Major, the album includes the composer’s “Sonatensatz”, the so-called “F-A-E Scherzo”, which comes from a collaborative violin sonata composed by Brahms, Robert Schumann and fellow composer Albert Dietrich. It is heard here transcribed for the cello from the violin original. Also featured on the disc are transcriptions for cello and piano of seven of his songs including the ever-popular "Wiegenlied" (Lullaby), "Melodien," "Sapphische Ode" (Sapphic Ode), "Feldeinsamkeit" (Solitude in the Fields), "Minnelied" (Love Song) and "Lerchengesang" (Lark Song).