Brahms: Zigeunerlieder, Op. 103

Brahms demonstrates his love of Hungarian music in these songs. Underlying all of them is the passionate or melancholic character of the Csárdás, the dance in 2/4 time that first gained popularity in the ballrooms of elegant Hungarian society in the 1830s. The theme that runs through the Mendelssohn songs is the entrancing experience of nature.

This charming disc presents a comprehensive selection of Brahms’s secular choral music. Through his professional activities, Brahms had a continuous interest in producing music for choirs, as well as profound insight into their capabilities. His impressive output of a cappella sacred choruses and motets makes learned and creative reference to such Baroque masters as Gabrieli, Schütz and Bach. Yet Brahms was equally adept in the traditions of the unaccompanied Romantic choral song, the Chorlied, following the lead of Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann, and adapting the form to his own characteristic ends. He also wrote a large number of vocal duets and quartets with piano accompaniment, including the popular Zigeunerlieder, which are testimony to his extraordinary fascination for gypsy music and its fertilizing effect on his style.

Selections from these secular forms are performed by the professional chamber choir Consortium, conducted by Andrew-John Smith, who will be familiar to Hyperion listeners from his acclaimed recording of Saint-Säens’ organ works.

At the 1987 Salzburg Festival recital the Slovenian mezzo Marjana Lipovšek concentrated on 19th-century works, straying only for her encores, with an impressive range of vocal colour and languages. Her pianist was Elisabeth Leonskaja, an accompanist entirely her equal. Their encores comprised Strauss's Die Nacht, another song by Brahms, an adaptation of a Slovenian folksong by the singer's father, Marijan Lipovšek, and, finally, Schubert's setting of Hölty's Seligkeit - a suitable description of the atmosphere that had developed between artists and audience over the course of the evening. It is an atmosphere that comes across in this live recording, the vitality of which is further underlined by Marjana Lipovšek's lively introductions to her encores.

The first eleven Zigeunerlieder, in a well-chosen sequence must be understood as a story, says Brahms. Brahms put the songs to music either in Thun, Switzerland in the summer of 1887, or in the winter 1887/88 on a train during a stopover in Budapest . Then followed four Lieder in 1891 together with the vocal quartets and Nächtens Sehnsucht (Text: Franz Theodor Kugler), followed by op. 112 .

The Zigeunerlieder can be seen as both the vocal counterpart of the Hungarian dances and as the counterpart of the exotic Liebeslieder-Walzer op. 52 and 65. The cycle owes its popularity to the great interest in folk music in the 19th century. Wrongly gypsy music was largely equated with Hungarian folk music.

The first performance of the Lieder op. 103 took place on 31 October 1888 in Berlin. The cycle was a great success from the start.

Very seldom recorded, this reissue on United Classics gives us the chance to hear these wonderful works and enjoy them to the fullest.