Schumann: Mein Schöner Stern! Op. 101 No. 4

The American baritone Barry McDaniel was one of the outstanding singers of the post-war era. As a successful opera singer and Lieder interpreter, he enjoyed a long and eventful career, both in Germany and abroad. Despite numerous performances and many recordings for radio and television, he nonetheless remained largely unnoticed by the media, partly because his name almost vanished in the shadow of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who was five years his senior. Unjustly so, since the two singers were equals as artists, albeit with different characters. Today, Barry McDaniel is hardly mentioned in specialist literature and one searches in vain for CDs since, until now, recordings from radio archives have not been phonographically processed. However, Audite now presents a première double CD of Lieder sung by Barry McDaniel. These studio recordings from the archives of Radio Berlin-Brandenburg (formally Sender Freies Berlin) were made between 1963 and 1974 with Hertha Klust and Aribert Reimann as accompanists.

This selection of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Duparc, Ravel and Debussy reveals diverse facets of McDaniel’s artistic personality. His interpretations are characterised by an interleaving of knowledge and naivety, feeling and craftsmanship, expression and impeccable singing. Apart from his immaculate technique, his accent-free German is particularly remarkable.

Barry McDaniel moved from the USA to Germany in 1953 in order to further his studies. He then gave his first song recitals, together with Hermann Reutter, and later began a career as an opera singer. In 1961 he was engaged at the newly re-opened Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he remained for thirty-seven years. At the same time, he gave guest performances at the Vienna Staatsoper, the Metropolitan Opera New York, the Frankfurt Opera and the Munich Opera Festival, as well as broadcasting for radio and television. In addition, Barry McDaniel gave numerous song recitals, for example in Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Hanover, Brunswick and Berlin, including, in the latter city, the first ever song recital at the newly built Philharmonie in 1963. Today, the 81-year-old baritone declares: “Whatever I sing, I have to believe in it.” That is exactly how these recordings sound.

The most prolific period of Schumann’s vocal composition began in 1840, in which he composed more than 140 songs, with the culmination being Dichterliebe. Award-winning tenor Daniel Johannsen and his duo partner, Elena Larina, consistently emphasize the compositional subtleties of these fine songs.

Mentors like Gerhard Schulz (Alban Berg Quartet) and Yuri Bashmet have already predicted that a great career lies ahead of the 30-year-old violist Nils Mönkemeyer. He is already one of his generation's leading viola players, with many competition wins to his name, including the UK’s Parkhouse Award in 2009, and the International Yuri Bashmet Competition in 2006.

For his Sony Classical début Ohne Worte (Without Words), the young musician from Bremen and his English piano partner Nicholas Rimmer have put together a recital programme that highlights the viola's 'voice-like' qualities. To this end, lieder by Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann have been arranged as songs without words for the viola. The recital is completed by Schubert's Arpeggione sonata in the version for viola and piano.

In selecting the songs to arrange, Mönkemeyer chose songs such as Schubert’s Ständchen, where the emphasis is first and foremost on the vocal line rather than the lyrics. The same applies to the songs by Schumann, which include lieder from well-known song cycles Liederkreis and Dichterliebe.

By way of contrast, the remaining works heard here by Mendelssohn and Schubert are arrangements of original instrumental pieces. Mendelssohn composed his Songs Without Words for the piano, while Franz Schubert originally wrote his Arpeggione sonata of 1823 for the six-stringed instrument of the same name. "There are fewer acrobatics involved on the viola", says Mönkemeyer; "the melodies flow more naturally and major leaps are avoided. That makes it all the more clear that the underlying idea that inspired this sonata is that of a song."

The British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, twice nominated for a Grammy, here performs a collection of songs by Robert Schumann, which combines two song cycles from the extremely prolific song year 1840 with several songs from the composer’s last years. She is accompanied by Eugene Asti.

Sarah Connolly fell in love with Schumann’s songs in her youth. She has sung them since her early days as a performer and in the booklet she and Eugene Asti write, ‘at the heart of Schumann’s music on this recording lie a profound melancholy and a personal and completely honest, open-hearted empathy for the poetry, which is totally disarming. All the stories and situations depicted in these songs were so much a part of the composer’s own life experience that we just cannot help but be touched and moved by them. Perhaps it is for these reasons that our love for Schumann is especially great, and we feel privileged to be able to share this extraordinary music with you’.

It is often claimed that Schumann’s late songs, which include the first seven on this CD, show a composer in decline – a charge that is refuted by such wonderful Lieder as the Wilhelm Meister settings and ‘Nachtlied’ (Goethe), ‘Der Einsiedler’ (Eichendorff), ‘Aufträge’ (L’Egru), ‘Mein schöner Stern!’ (Rückert), ‘Requiem’ (Dreves), the Lenau settings of Op. 90 and the Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, all of which are as fine as anything Schumann wrote in 1840, his great ‘song’ year.

The album’s key work is the rarely recorded Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, songs on five poems attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots. They were his last Lieder and the most austere that Schumann ever wrote. He composed the set in 1852 during a period of deep depression and offered the work as a Christmas present to his wife, Clara. It is also matched here by ‘Requiem’, setting a translation by Leberecht Blücher Dreves of an old sacred Latin text. This requiem, from Op. 90, was one of four that Schumann composed in the last years of his creative life, and it seems likely that the proliferation of such settings around 1850 had symbolic import – ‘requiems, after all, are written for oneself’, as Schumann once confided to a friend.