Mahler: Scheiden und Meiden (Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit)

Julie Fuchs, the 26-year-old soprano from Avignon, has just won a Victoire de la Musique Classique in the 'Lyrical Revelation of the Year' category, after being hailed a Classical Revelation by the perfomers’ rights society, ADAMI and carrying off the Gabriel Dessurget prize at the 2011 Aix-en-Provence Festival. Today, roles such as Susanna in 'Figaro' or Urgande in 'Amadis de Gaule' correspond perfectly to the quality of her voice, as did the title role in 'Acis et Galatée' which she took in July 2011 for the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Over the coming decade, that voice and that stage presence will see her moving towards weightier roles, with the title role of La Traviata beckoning. She’s at the start of a big career: one to watch.

Alma Mahler was greatly admired by many gentlemen of intellectual circles during the late nineteenth-century. This disc portrays songs set by Alma Mahler, Alexander Zemlinsky and Gustav Mahler.

Ruth Ziesak easily portrays the joy and sorrow in each of these lieder, skillfully accompanied by Gerold Huber.

Wolfgang Holzmair is one of the great word-painters of our time and one of the foremost interpreters of Mahler’s songs.

He is embarking on an international tour of this repertoire, which has been a central part of his career, to mark his 60th birthday. His interpretation of this music draws upon many years of experience and brings a deep insight to these wonderful songs.

Mahler composed his settings of poems by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim in 1892. The piano-writing is remarkable for its almost orchestral complexity and imitation of orchestral effects. Mahler would eventually score 12 of the 'Wunderhorn' songs for orchestra. The poems’ appeal to Mahler is easy to understand: nature, yearning, love, farewells, night, death, spectral goings-on, boisterous youth, high spirits and wry, crisp humour all combined with the agitated imagination and personality of the composer to produce some of the greatest songs by any composer. They also formed the fertile ground from which several of the symphonies grew.

Berio had an abiding fascination with reconciling the past and the present, which can be seen in his orchestral realisations of works by Mahler and Brahms, and most notably, in Rendering (1990), his typically creative completion of unfinished symphonic sketches by Schubert.

In Rendering, Berio – in his own words – sets himself the target of ‘following those modern restoration criteria that aim at reviving the old colours without, however, trying to disguise the damage that time has caused, often leaving inevitable empty patches in the composition’. In the ‘restoration’, Schubert’s sketches have been beautifully orchestrated in period style, and the ‘empty patches’ have been filled with music composed by Berio himself, in his own voice – thereby successfully combining the musical worlds of the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries into one convincing whole.

The Clarinet Sonata by Brahms embodies the composer’s taut and concentrated compositional style. In transcribing the work, Berio felt that, when experienced in the less intimate surroundings of today’s concert halls, the extreme compression of Brahms’s late chamber music style was in need of some additional support, and his version, recorded here, includes a fourteen-bar orchestral introduction to the first movement, leading into Brahms’s own, much shorter opening phrase, as well as five additional bars at the beginning of the second movement.

Berio completed his orchestration of six early songs by Gustav Mahler in 1987, and conducted the first performance with the Toscanini Orchestra on 7 December that year, with Thomas Hampson the baritone soloist. The six songs in this orchestrated set are ‘Hans und Grete’, ‘Phantasie’, ‘Scheiden und Meiden’, ‘Erinnerung’, ‘Frühlingsmorgen’, and ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’.

The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Edward Gardner, with Roderick Williams the baritone soloist in the songs by Mahler and Michael Collins the soloist in Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata.

At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century the interest of the composers for a cappella choir music seemed to be weakening; Mahler and Debussy wrote for choir, then promptly included them into orchestral works. The a capella music of the 1920s was influenced by the polyphonic tradition of the 16th century.

In the 1960s Ligeti opened up new perspectives with his piece for choir Lux aeterna.

Gottwald’s transcriptions refer to Ligeti’s work giving us ultimately better understanding of the contemporary choir music.

Bo Skovus is considered to be one of the top Lieder interpreters of his generation.

This Danish baritone is a star of the Vienna State Opera.

He performs with the leading opera houses and orchestras in Europe, America and Japan.

These releases from the archives of the RIAS and the Sender Freies Berlin document the unequalled quantitative and qualitative spectrum which baritone Fischer-Dieskau acquired during the five decades of his career.

They offer a fascinating insight into the breadth of his repertoire as well as his artistic approach, with which he maintained a careful balance of development and continuity until the end. These recordings – spanning Beethoven’s sacred songs Op. 48 of 1806, through Schumann, Brahms, Mahler and Reger, to Heinrich Sutermeister’s expressive psalm setting of 1948 – demonstrate the essential Fischer-Dieskau.

Not only do they document the artistic partnership with pianists such as Hertha Klust, Daniel Barenboim, Cord Garben, Aribert Reimann and Tamás Vásáry, but also the delightful collaboration with the organist Ulrich Bremsteller.

Furthermore, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau can be heard together with his wife and musical partner, Julia Varady. This is a documentary edition both in the sense of a historic and an artistic legacy: it reveals the riches of lieder from the last two centuries which Fischer-Dieskau, in his role of musical chronicler, made accessible for the present age; and it is an impressive record of an incomparable interpretational art, according to which word and music were always treated and realised as a unit.