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Schubert Revisited: Lieder Arranged for Baritone and Orchestra

Matthias Goerne

Classical - Released January 6, 2023 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Hi-Res Booklet
Pianist Alexander Schmalcz has performed alongside many famous singers during his career and is also a talented arranger. At the request of Matthias Goerne, he orchestrated Schubert’s lieder in the spirit of similar works by Berlioz, Reger, Liszt and Webern. Matthias Goerne has performed these orchestrations in numerous concerts, both in Europe and in New York, as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival.Schmalcz’s arrangements are both rigorous and conscientious. They’re perfect for Matthias Goerne’s dark tone, which is particularly graceful on this recording made in October 2019 with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. Over the years, the German baritone’s voice has become even more well-rounded, finding deep golden bass tones.The orchestration gives these 20 lieder exceptional weight, further emphasised by the mellowness of the strings, the darkness of the trombones and the sometimes ominous use of the timpani. This orchestration plunges Schubert’s music into a romantic universe similar to lieder by Brahms and even Wolf, especially in Songs of the harpist (Gesänge des Harfners), The Erl-King (Erlkönig) and the famous lieder Death and the maiden (Der Tod und das Mädchen). The anachronism of these arrangements is magnified by the silky accompaniment of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and Matthias Goerne’s stunning vocals. © François Hudry/Qobuz
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Schubert: Lieder with Orchestra

Munich Radio Orchestra

Classical - Released October 6, 2023 | BR-Klassik

Hi-Res Booklets
One might react to this album with initial annoyance and ask whether it is really necessary to hear orchestrated versions of Schubert's supremely pianistic songs. It may come as a surprise, then, to find that most of these Lieder with Orchestra were arranged by great composers. They include Benjamin Britten, Jacques Offenbach, and Max Reger, who took on the job because, he said, he hated to hear a piano-accompanied song on an orchestral program. Perhaps the most surprising name to find is that of Anton Webern, but his arrangements are not the minimal, pointillistic things one might expect; he wrote these arrangements as a way of studying Schubert's music, and they are quite straightforward. Indeed, it is somewhat difficult to distinguish the arrangers simply by listening to the music; Schubert's melodic lines tend to suggest distinctive solutions. Perhaps Reger's are a bit more lush than the others, although his version of Erlkönig, D. 328, is one of the few numbers here that just doesn't work (there is no way to replicate the percussive quality of the accompaniment). As for the performances as such, Benjamin Appl is clearly an important rising baritone, and he has a wonderful natural quality in Schubert. An oddball release like this might seem an unusual choice for a singer in early career, but he contributes his own notes, and he seems to have undertaken the project out of genuine enthusiasm for the material. At the very least, he has brought some intriguing pieces out of the archives and given them highly listenable performances. The Munich Radio Orchestra, under the young Oscar Jockel, is suitably restrained and keeps out of Appl's way. This release made classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo
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Vanitas - Beethoven, Schubert & Rihm

Georg Nigl

Classical - Released November 13, 2020 | Alpha Classics

Hi-Res Booklet
Like the paintings of the Flemish Baroque painters, the ‘vanities’ presented here can be approached in two ways: on the one hand, as manifestations of doubts and anxieties at the fragility of human life; on the other, as delights to be savoured without moderation, celebrating earthly life through the senses and the pleasure that human beings can derive from them. After two critically acclaimed recordings each for Alpha, the baritone Georg Nigl and the pianist Olga Pashchenko explore the tortuous meanders of the human soul with vocal works by Schubert (an ‘existentialist’ composer if ever there was one), Beethoven (whose torments hardly need stressing) and the contemporary composer Wolfgang Rihm, whose highly expressionistic Jakob Lenz Nigl performed on stage in 2019. His piece Vermischter Traum, here given its world premiere, is dedicated to the Austrian singer. © Alpha Classics
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Wanderer

Andreas Scholl

Classical - Released January 1, 2012 | Decca Music Group Ltd.

Hi-Res Distinctions 5 de Diapason - 4 étoiles Classica
German countertenor Andreas Scholl is known not only for his gorgeous voice, but gutsy programming, and he may never have been more gutsy than in this set of German Romantic and proto-Romantic (an important distinction of which more in a moment) songs. It's pretty clear that any of the composers included on this album would have doubled over with laughter at the idea of hearing his music sung by a countertenor, and the highly gendered quality of the music of the 19th century is one of its primary motivating forces. Thus there's real excitement in hearing that Scholl does, in fact, pull it off. Quoted in the notes, he offers the expected platitudes about how what matters in singing lieder is not voice type but connection with the music. Yet there's more than that to what's happening here. Scholl does not simply program a typical lieder recital; rather, he tailors his repertoire to his unusual voice. Haydn, with three songs, and Mozart (two) are overrepresented, and this helps bridge the acceptance gap: the simple, folklike melodies of these songs (Haydn's are in English) require less suspension of disbelief than do the full-blown Romantic pieces. Moving into Schubert, Scholl makes some interesting choices. The famed Ave Maria is a piece of sheer Italianate melody that works beautifully in Scholl's voice; it's of a piece with any number of his earlier recordings. In Der Tod und das Mädchen, D. 531 (Death and the Maiden, the source of a tremendous set of variations in one of Schubert's string quartets), Scholl sings both of the dialogic parts himself: the Maiden is his usual countertenor voice, while he sings Death as a baritone. The strangeness of this leapfrogs, as it were, that of hearing a countertenor sing Schubert. Add to these the fact that Scholl mostly avoids songs with romantic and erotic themes, and it adds up to an album that continually surprises rather than one that is trying to force something into a mold where it doesn't belong. Accompanist Tamar Halperin stays mostly out of the way, which is the right thing to do, and in all Scholl can claim another in his string of triumphs, even if it's maybe not the first one for newcomers to start out with.© TiVo
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Romantische Arien / Airs romantiques (Wagner, Schubert, Schumann, Weber, Nicolaï)

Christian Gerhaher

Vocal Music (Secular and Sacred) - Released November 16, 2012 | Sony Classical

Booklet Distinctions Diapason d'or - 4 étoiles Classica
German baritone Christian Gerhaher has recorded lieder, and his fundamentally gentle, intimate, moderate-sized voice is suited to that genre. Here, however, he steps it up successfully to early Romantic opera, from Schubert up to Wagner's Tannhäuser and Otto Nicolai. If you're wondering about the two separate Schubert operas, that gives you an idea of the value of this vocal-orchestral recital: it touches on some very unfamiliar music and generally does a good job bringing it to life. Schubert's 1823 opera Alfonso und Estrella, not performed until it was revived by Liszt in 1854, has been recorded, but the excerpt from Der Graf von Gleichen, sketched out at the end of Schubert's life and left unfinished (the realization here is by Richard Dünser, made in the 1990s) is a much rarer animal. This is the highlight of the album; in Gerhaher's hands, the aria "O Himmel ... Mein Weib, O Gott, mein süßer Knabe" emerges as a real piece of Schubert's broad and harmonically pathbreaking late style. Another comparative rarity is the excerpt from Schumann's opera Genoveva, usually accounted the great failure of Schumann's later years; Gerhaher gives the excerpt "Ja wart' du bis zum jüngsten Tag" a spiky quality that is quite Wagnerian in its free speech cadences. The more melodic music from Otto Nicolai's Die Heimkehr des Verbannten, also not common on recordings, provides an effective foil. Gerhaher's voice has many surface pleasures, but his accomplishment here is to make the listener want to undertake a fresh hearing of the operas involved. A fine outing from the on-a-roll Sony Classical label, nicely recorded.© TiVo
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Schubert Revisited: Lieder Arranged for Baritone and Orchestra

Matthias Goerne

Classical - Released January 6, 2023 | Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Booklet
Pianist Alexander Schmalcz has performed alongside many famous singers during his career and is also a talented arranger. At the request of Matthias Goerne, he orchestrated Schubert’s lieder in the spirit of similar works by Berlioz, Reger, Liszt and Webern. Matthias Goerne has performed these orchestrations in numerous concerts, both in Europe and in New York, as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival.Schmalcz’s arrangements are both rigorous and conscientious. They’re perfect for Matthias Goerne’s dark tone, which is particularly graceful on this recording made in October 2019 with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. Over the years, the German baritone’s voice has become even more well-rounded, finding deep golden bass tones.The orchestration gives these 20 lieder exceptional weight, further emphasised by the mellowness of the strings, the darkness of the trombones and the sometimes ominous use of the timpani. This orchestration plunges Schubert’s music into a romantic universe similar to lieder by Brahms and even Wolf, especially in Songs of the harpist (Gesänge des Harfners), The Erl-King (Erlkönig) and the famous lieder Death and the maiden (Der Tod und das Mädchen). The anachronism of these arrangements is magnified by the silky accompaniment of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and Matthias Goerne’s stunning vocals. © François Hudry/Qobuz
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Nachtviolen - Schubert: Lieder

Christian Gerhaher

Classical - Released June 16, 2014 | Sony Classical

Booklet Distinctions 5 de Diapason - Gramophone Editor's Choice
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Abendstern, D. 806

Timothy Sharp

Classical - Released June 25, 2021 | Timothy Sharp