Elīna Garanča / Malcolm Martineau LIEDER

 

LIEDER

 

Fatma Said EL NOUR

EL NOUR

 

Christiane Karg / Malcolm Martineau ERINNERUNG

ERINNERUNG

 

Christiane Karg / Malcolm Martineau STRAUSS, FAURÉ, DEBUSSY, POULENC, WOLF & BERG

The Wigmore Hall debut of young Bavarian soprano Christiane Karg in July 2012 proved a glistening highlight of the summer’s song recital series. A regular guest at the world’s leading opera houses, singing roles from Musetta (La bohème) to Poppea (L’incoronazione di Poppea), she is also renowned throughout the world for her enchanting performances on the concert platform.

Her recital featured two themes to link the programme: botanical in the first half, nocturnal in the second. Exploring celebrated jewels of the art song repertoire alongside lesser-known, but equally charming, discoveries, the programme moves from rarely heard floral songs from Strauss’s teens, through dreamy settings by Fauré, Debussy and Poulenc, mysterious and nocturnal Lieder of Wolf to Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder.
 

Dorothea Röschmann / Malcolm Martineau PORTRAITS

Dorothea Röschmann releases her new recital album including well known songs by Schubert, Schumann, Strauss and Wolf. She is accompanied by Malcolm Martineau who is recognized as one of the leading accompanists of his generation.

"The idea for this program of female portraits took seed a long time ago, when I was studying in London with the wonderful teacher, Vera Rozsa. I used to make frequent pilgrimages to the extraordinary National Portrait Gallery where one is surrounded by the most imposing portraits of British personalities and royalty, such as the Tudors and Queen Elizabeth I, as well as countless figures from British history – poets, physicians and so on - all concentrated and condensed within the confines of the building.

A portrait represents a very intense encounter with a person and you believe you know them better after having studied the picture for some time. It can only give you a glimpse of the personality, but also creates an impression of how the person wanted to be portrayed. In songs, a portrait is the musical interpretation of a fictionalized person from literature (Gretchen, Mignon), or real life (Mary Stuart), but the process of character portrayal and trying to get deeper and deeper through different layers, has to happen musically. As a portrait, it can only attempt to portray a snapshot of all the emotions of the character but the longer you live with a song, the more you find in it, as in all music.

This fascination with character interpretation in song and in opera, led to my desire to put together a programme with portraits that reflect the finely shaded nuances of the figures presented here. In the same way, female characters such as Mignon and Gretchen, created by Goethe, and Mary, Queen of Scots, have stimulated the imagination of poets, composers and artists alike. We have included songs by Richard Strauss as every one of them can be regarded as a miniature mood portrait.

The original Schubert setting of ‘Gretchens Bitte’ is only a fragment of Goethe’s poem so we have chosen Benjamin Britten’s ‘complete’ version as it gives a more comprehensive characterization of Gretchen." Dorothea Röschmann. (Presto Classical)

Christiane Karg / Malcolm Martineau HEIMLICHE AUFFORDERUNG

Christiane Karg feels close to Richard Strauss, and not simply because they both grew up amid Bavarian landscape. Together with Mozart, the great late Romanticist now plays an ever greater part in her repertoire: she was recently acclaimed in both Antwerp and Ghent as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. Since Strauss has always figured in her lieder recitals, this CD of Strauss lieder comes as no surprise, especially in view of the forthcoming anniversary year, marking the composer's 150th birthday. Indeed, anyone who has followed Christiane Karg's career will see this new release as a logical consequence. You only have to listen to the timbres in her voice and the skill with which she lends them an artistic and natural touch, and you will hardly be able to avoid comparisons with the great voices of her Fach.

Christiane Karg's personal choice of lieder combines the familiar with the seldomheard, lively songs with more reflective ones, and delivers a convincing range that rightly demotes such details to a secondary role. She succeeds in demonstrating as has seldom been achieved the touching manner in which Strauss's early and mature lyricism is able to transform the great themes of love and transience that were woven into his expression of the Romantic world around him.

One especially charming example is the song "Alphorn" written when the composer was a mere twelve years old, requiring an obbligato horn, played on this recording by Felix Klieser. Her pianist is Malcolm Martineau, an exceptional artist in his own right, who navigates virtuoso hurdles with ease while giving the vocal part a steady foundation. One only needs to hear the opening bars of "Morgen" in order to capture that remarkable musical pulse. – This is a real summit of achievement! (Presto Classical)

Alison Balsom / Tom Poster LÉGENDE

Star trumpeter Alison Balsom adds her first recital with piano to her rich Warner Classics catalogue. Recorded live at St George’s, Bristol, she and Tom Poster, her long-standing recital partner, explore fascinating works from the 20th century, by composers such as Enescu, Hindemith, Martinů, Françaix, Bernstein and Peter Maxwell Davies. They also present a work they themselves have composed jointly: The Thoughts of Dr. May, inspired by Brian May, lead guitarist of the rock band Queen.

2013 Gramophone Artist of the Year, three-time winner at the Classic BRITs and also three-time winner at the Echo Klassik Awards, Alison Balsom has cemented an international reputation as one of classical music’s great ambassadors and is ranked amongst the most distinctive and ground-breaking musicians on the international circuit today. “This day has been a long time coming,” she says. “We’ve wanted to record this … most important repertoire for trumpet and piano since we started playing together more than 10 years ago.” (Warner Classics)

Christiane Karg SCENE!

That indefatigable one-man libretto factory Pietro Metastasio is the linking thread in these scenas of damsels in extremis, complemented in Ch’io mi scordi di te by the pseudo-Metastasio of Idomeneo librettist Gianbattista Varesco. With Beethoven’s Ah, perfido!, Christiane Karg’s expressive lyric soprano edges towards Leonore territory in a bid, as she puts it in the booklet interview, ‘to push boundaries, and to test my voice in other registers’. If you’ve heard Nilsson and Callas in this music, Karg might initially seem underpowered. But we are, after all, still in the 18th century. In close collusion with Jonathan Cohen’s crack period band, Karg lives each nuance of the abandoned heroine’s fluctuating emotions, from vengeful outrage to morbid pathos. She burns into the Italian consonants in the recitative, spins a tender legato in the aria’s slow opening section, then flares thrillingly into accusatory fury in the Allegro. Throughout, Karg holds vocal finesse and expressive intensity in near-ideal equipoise.

Haydn noted in his quaint English that the Italian diva Brigida Banti ‘song very scanty’ in the 1795 premiere of his Scena di Berenice. He would surely have had no qualms about Karg’s performance, whether in the gravely sculpted line of the Adagio aria or the passionate abandon of the F minor close, where she unfurls a surprisingly powerful chest register. In Miseri noi, Haydn’s music is too serenely dignified for such a grim text, but Karg brings it alive in a way I have never heard before, making the coloratura sound desperate, in the right sense, rather than merely brilliant.

In Mozart’s ravishing Ch’io mi scordi di te, Karg complements the delicate tones of Malcolm Martineau’s fortepiano in an unusually intimate performance, softening her naturally bright timbre and ornamenting with taste and discretion. The relative oddball here is the rare Mendelssohn scena in its original London version of 1834: an entertaining piece of near-pastiche, with a slow aria with violin obbligato – silkily expounded by Alina Pogostkina – that sounds like Mozart grown faintly decadent, and a seething Allegro that seems to cross Beethoven and Rossini. Karg spits contempt for her faithless lover in the opening recitative, then matches the violin in yearning eloquence before surging with controlled delirium through Mendelssohn’s long lines in the Allegro. Looking for trouble, I wanted a slightly closer balancing of the fortepiano in Ch’io mi scordi di te. But this is nit-picking. Singing with style, grace and fiery temperament, Karg brings each of these distraught heroines excitingly, individually alive, while the superb players of Arcangelo – not least the dulcet clarinets – are true dramatic partners rather than mere accompanists. (Richard Wigmore / Gramophone)