Matthias Goerne, Seong-Jin Cho IM ABENDROT

 

IM ABENDROT

 

Antoine Tamestit / Cédric Tiberghien JOHANNES BRAHMS Sonatas op. 120 - Zwei Gesänge Op. 91 - Wiegenlied

 

SONATAS OP. 120

 

Matthias Goerne / Jan Lisiecki LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Lieder

                                                                         LIEDER

Matthias Goerne / Leif Ove Andsnes ROBERT SCHUMANN Liederkreis Op. 24 - Kernerlieder

In the miraculous year of 1840, which Schumann began in despair, forcibly separated from Clara by her father, he composed nearly 150 lieder, including the two outstanding cycles presented here, based respectively on poems by the great Heine (the Liederkreis op.24) and by Justinus Kerner (the twelve Kernerlieder op.35).

Haunted from beginning to end by Romantic Nature, in the hands of two such outstanding artists as Matthias Goerne and Leif Ove Andsnes these two masterpieces invite us, performers and listeners alike, to share a state of transcendence, a heightened consciousness that transports us directly to the heart of lived experience itself.

Matthias Goerne / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra / Daniel Harding THE WAGNER PROJECT

When does an album become a project? Perhaps when it is spread over two CDs, as Matthias Goerne and Daniel Harding’s collaboration is, or when it is devoted to a sole composer, in this case Wagner, whose work you cannot really dip into track by track but have to fall into head first.

Collections of Wagnerian extracts used to be called ‘bleeding chunks’ and it isn’t just Goerne’s wounded Amfortas from Parsifal who is dripping here. There isn’t a wholly satisfactory way to explore the characters of Wotan, Sachs, Amfortas et al with corresponding orchestral interludes – just as you’re building up the existential agony, it’s time for another opera – but this selection is particularly disjointed and the labels given to the album’s two parts, ‘Of Gods and Men’ and ‘Redemption’, are so vague as to be more or less irrelevant.

And the jump-cuts really chafe. The Tristan Prelude and Liebestod are the strange sandwich wrapping to King Mark’s monologue. The Valhalla monologue from Rheingold ends before Wotan can actually join his family on the Rainbow Bridge, and there’s no coda to Wolfram’s Evening Star from Tannhäuser, just a cliff-edge. As for sending us out on a high, Goerne’s final contribution is Amfortas’s Act 3 lament over the corpse of his father Titurel. Redemption is left to the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra for the Good Friday Music which marks Project Wagner’s finale.

Still, Goerne does misery masterfully. The brief taster from Parsifal makes one long for a complete Amfortas, so completely does Goerne soak up the character’s misery. His Dutchman, too, queasy with self-loathing, is a frightening portrait of a broken mind. Mark’s monologue, though it lies low for an essentially baritonal voice, is lacking in kingly fury but high on wounded melancholy, with Goerne’s partner in woe the SRSO’s bass clarinettist, lowing alongside.

The flip side to Goerne’s magisterial introspection is that sometimes the characters deserve bigger personalities. His lyrical phrasing and Lieder-like unspooling of Hans Sachs’s ‘Was duftet doch der Flieder’ from Die Meistersinger is impeccable but missing is Sachs’s geniality and warmth. As Goerne’s Wotan kisses Brünnhilde to sleep, the moment is so intimate that (depending on your speakers) you might even feel a peck on the cheek. Yet this isn’t a god to terrify or awe you.

Once heard, however, Goerne’s Wagner is hard to shift from your mind: he has something new to bring to this repertory and his next steps with it onstage should be fascinating if he can find the right partners. Here, Harding offers him space and breadth and draws clean, bright textures from his players. In orchestral passages recorded by all the greats, that isn’t always enough: the strings lack some depth and colour, and tempos, particularly in the extracts from Parsifal, tend to the slack. Orchestra and conductor are at their most imaginative in a shimmering, almost playful Liebestod. (Neil Fisher / Gramophone)

Quatuor Ebène / Gautier Capuçon / Matthias Goerne SCHUBERT String Quintet - Lieder

Recording Franz Schubert's String Quintet in C major, D. 956, is a major achievement for most string players, and Quatuor Ebène's performance with cellist Gautier Capuçon on Erato is a high point in their discography. Playing with great transparency and alertness, the quintet delivers a vital performance that captures the rarefied, almost mystical quality of Schubert's late masterpiece while maintaining a sense of urgency and, at times, explosive energy. This is to be expected of a world-class string quartet, and it's probably more than enough effort for a single CD. Yet the program continues with a set of five of Schubert's lieder, sung by baritone Matthias Goerne and accompanied by Quatuor Ebène and double bassist Laurène Durantel, in arrangements by Raphaël Merlin. These versions for voice and strings were conceived in the spirit of the Schubertiades, on the idea that string players likely were in attendance and eager to join Schubert in impromptu music-making. While these transcriptions are speculative, they are certainly enjoyable for their beautiful tone and subdued feeling, and Goerne sings with warmth and expressiveness to match the subtle moods of the arrangements. (Blair Sanderson)

Matthias Goerne / Christoph Eschenbach BRAHMS Vier ernste Gesänge

It's the late Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, that get the big print on the cover of this release by the awe-inspiring baritone Matthias Goerne, but actually the music on the album falls into a neat early-middle-late classification scheme. The group of middle-period settings of poetry by Heinrich Heine doesn't even get graphics on the cover, but these are fascinating. Brahms wrote a lot of songs, but you couldn't do better than the selection and performances here for a cornerstone collection item. Beyond the sheer beauty of Goerne's voice is an ability to shift gears to match how Brahms' style evolved. If you want to hear his real slashing, operatic high notes, check out the Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 32, settings of poems by the minor poets Georg Friedrich Daumer and Karl August Graf von Platen. These rather overwrought texts add up to a kind of slimmed-down Winterreise, and they catch the spirit of the still-young Brahms with his strong passions, elegantly controlled. The Heine settings, which come from several different sets of lieder, are not that often heard and are in some ways the most compelling of the group here. Goerne is a good deal quieter in these, except for a few bursts of emotion, and he draws the listener into Brahms' intricate phrase-rhythm recasting of Heine's deceptively simple rhymes. Sample Der Tod, der ist der kühle Nacht, Op. 96, No. 1, where Goerne keeps both Heine's four lines plus four and Brahms' three plus three plus two rhythms in your head at the same time. The Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, the marquee attraction, are even more complicated in terms of the rhythm of the vocal lines of the songs. Brahms, the atheist, chose for this reflection on impending death (Clara Schumann's, and soon his own) biblical texts that don't mention God or Jesus, and devised a personal, reflective tone in response that relies on extremely subtle inflections of Martin Luther's prose texts. Goerne is clearly at the top of his powers here, and it would be difficult to find the results anything but haunting. This recording consists of a pair of sessions at Berlin's Teldex studios, held more than two and a half years apart. The sound is fine, but it would be nice to know who had the idea of putting them together on a single album. Whether it was Goerne or someone else, the final product is uniquely satisfying.  (James Manheim)

Matthias Goerne / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Josep Pons BERIO Sinfonia MAHLER / BERIO 10 Frühe Lieder

"Since it was first performed in 1969, Luciano Berio's Sinfonia has become a classic, certainly the most widely known of all his works and arguably the most successful concert piece by a composer of his generation." The Guardian

This release is dedicated to the pioneer of Italian modernism Luciano Berio. His 5-movement 'Sinfonia', is undoubtedly his most well-known work, written for the New York Philharmonic and dedicated to Leonard Bernstein. It has become one of the key works and principle musical manifestations of the 1960s bringing together collage technique and modernism.
A few years later, Berio went on to orchestrate a number of songs on texts from 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn', which Mahler had scored for piano and voice, as if they had been written at the time of the later 'Kindertotenlieder'. A symphonic backcloth tailor-made for the great baritone voice of Matthias Goerne [whose 'Knaben Wunderhorn' songs are already available on DVD, with Andris Nelsons, from Lucerne]. His warm, dark voice allows him to capture the sombre and tragic atmosphere of this music like no one else. (Presto Classical)

Hilary Hahn / Matthias Goerne / Christine Schäfer BACH Violin and Voice

This album has been years in the making. I first played some of these works more than a decade ago, and ever since then I have worked toward assembling an integral project of this repertoire.

My first exposure to Bach for violin and voice came when I was four, just a couple of months after I began to play violin. My father sang in a local choir in those days, and my mother and I went to see his group perform. In the middle of a cantata by Bach, a member of the choir suddenly stepped forward with a violin and played a duet with the soprano. I was mesmerized. The way the instrument's sound wove in and out of the vocal line - sometimes plaintive, sometimes playful, always supple and alive - seemed magical beyond belief.

The amazement broadened to appreciation as I grew older. Encouraged by my childhood teacher, Klara Berkovich, to find models of expression that appealed to me outside of violin, I absorbed much from the recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Pears, Rosa Ponselle and Fritz Wunderlich that played in our house; and every holiday season, as we prepared dinners and exchanged gifts, the Messiah, B-minor Mass and St Matthew Passion sang out from the stereo. There was also a chamber music component. When I was ten, I began to study with Jascha Brodsky, then in his 80s and no longer performing. A friend of his gave me an audiotape containing Dover Beach for voice and string quartet, recorded in the 1930s. There I heard Samuel Barber's elegant baritone paired with the exquisite violin playing of a youthful Mr. Brodsky, and again the entwining of voice and violin swept me away. For several years after that, at every music festival I attended, I asked if it would be possible to work Dover Beach into the program. And because I had such good experiences with the musicians I met on those occasions, I searched for further repertoire involving singers. 

That search brought me back to Bach. In my late teens, when I had a chance to play one of Bach's arias for violin and voice at the Marlboro Music Festival, I found the interplay of lines as thrilling as it had been when I was a child of four - with the added pleasure of being able to understand the words. And as I learned other arias of Bach, I grew increasingly attached to the repertoire, until finally I proposed the present recording.
 That this project has come to fulfillment - and with such superb colleagues - is for me a dream come true. These magnificent pieces go to the heart of Bach's artistry as a composer of polyphony: multiple voices, at once clean and complex, presenting layer beneath layer for discovery. No matter how many times I play this music, I am always surprised to find in it new intricacies, new touches of beauty. I hope the same proves true for all who hear this album. (Hilary Hahn 10/2009)