Nightfall is undoubtedly one of the most personal and intimate moments of our daily lives. We return home to our loved ones, slowly transitioning from the hubbub of the outside world to the silence of the evening. It’s to this unique time of day that Elīna Garanča wanted to dedicate her album When Night Falls…she invites us on a musical journey to the planet’s different countries and time zones.The mezzo-soprano of Latvian origin isn’t known solely for her unique timbre; her voice, warm and brimming with infinite strength, has proven itself for over 30 years in all of the greatest opera houses across the world . Elīna Garanča also speaks six languages fluently: along with Latvian, she speaks German, English, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, almost all of which are used on When Night Falls…for the first time, this album carves out a special place for her mother tongue, which Elīna Garanča justifies outright in an interview with Qobuz: “It’s been a long time coming for Latvian music to be heard, don’t you think?” Alongside lieder by composer Raimonds Pauls, living legend in Latvia and friend of the singer, we also find writings by Aspazija, “our national female poet,” set to music. Latvian repertoire is all the more present on this album for the vivid childhood memories the singer has kept of the familiar sounds that she heard in the evenings, and the songs that were sung to her to lull her to sleep. Yet given the subject at hand, how could we forget the great romantics? The album opens with Strauss’s “Wiegenlied (Lullaby),” followed by lieder by Brahms, Schubert, and Humperdinck. Elīna Garanča also dedicates a significant part of the album to Spanish and Italian repertoire, most notably by contemporary composers such as Manuel de Falla, Xavier Montsalvatge, and Luciano Berio. With virtuosity and a lovely diversity in timbre, with each shift in style, the singer achieves a true musical metamorphosis, backed by the formidable Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria, conducted by Karel Mark Chichon – her real-life spouse. “Each of my albums is a reflection of my internal state,” explains the soprano. Here, the withdrawal into a more intimate sphere – particularly in the uncertain times in which we live today – is incarnated by music that holds us tight, offering us a glimmer of hope within the darkness. © Lena Germann/Qobuz

This 2023 release inaugurates an ongoing series from baritone Samuel Hasselhorn and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz, performing Schubert works two centuries on from their date of composition, and slated to culminate in 2028, the bicentennial of the composer's death. The project begins with one of the most famous Schubert song cycles of all, Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795, depicting the crackup and despair of a young wanderer who falls in love with a beautiful miller's daughter. Hasselhorn has plenty of recent competition in this cycle; listeners can sample the 2017 recording by Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber for another approach, but this one promises well for the ongoing project. Die schöne Müllerin is a work in which Schubert took vast strides toward the emancipation of the piano in the lied, and Bushakevitz leans into this aspect, with details that illuminate and often foreshadow themes developing in the text. Hasselhorn has a warm baritone with an appealing conversational tone that turns chilly and quiet toward the cycle's downer conclusion. Another draw is Harmonia Mundi's sound from the b-sharp studio in Berlin; the engineers put Bushakevitz just a bit forward in the mix, not so much as to sap energy from Hasselhorn's singing, but enough to highlight his perceptive performance. This release bodes well indeed for the duo's future work.© James Manheim /TiVo

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

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

“Nacht und Träume” takes its name from one of Schubert’s best-loved lieder, which is joined on the album by a further 10 of the composer’s songs. All performed in orchestral versions by such masters as Berlioz, Liszt, Brahms, Strauss, Webern, Britten and Schubert himself, they are complemented by three choral numbers and an orchestral interlude. The singers are rising stars – German mezzo-soprano Wiebke Lehmkuhl and French tenor Stanislas de Barbeyrac – and Laurence Equilbey conducts two ensembles she founded: the Insula orchestra and the choir Accentus. © Warner Classics

One morning in 1822, Schubert wrote down an enigmatic text in which all his ghosts seem to take shape: wandering, solitude, consolation, disappointed love. Inspired by this dreamlike narrative, Raphaël Pichon, Pygmalion and Stéphane Degout have devised a vast Romantic fresco, combining resurrection of unknown treasures with rediscovery of established masterpieces. © harmonia mundi

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Elysium (the Elysian Fields) was a Greek notion of the positive afterlife that dates back as far as Homer. The early Romantics were fascinated by its resonances, and if the organizing principle of this recital by the increasingly Schubert-oriented soprano Carolyn Sampson seems a bit vague, well, so was the concept in Schubert's time. It extended into realms of sleep, ghost stories, the moon and stars, and really many kinds of spirituality -- religious and otherwise. CD buyers get an enlightening booklet note by the song historian Susan Youens that amplifies the tightly woven sequence of songs Sampson offers here. There are a few Schubert hits, but also some lieder that only Schubert buffs will have heard, such as the title track, setting a lengthy ode by Schiller. The program is one that Sampson and accompanist managed to perform in recital at the height of the pandemic, and it is clear that she has lived in the songs for a while and knows their little turns. In general, it is a delightfully moody set that features deep interaction between Sampson and Joseph Middleton, with the latter grabbing the listener's attention right from the opening bars. Sampson's voice in mid-career has developed a slight and not unpleasant metallic tinge that she deploys well in the reflective moods of these songs and that blooms startlingly in the final melodrama Abschied von der Erde, D. 829. Consider the knife's-edge opening long note in Nacht und Träume, D. 827, also a splendid example of Middleton's art. With excellent Potton Hall sound, this is an absorbing Schubert recital that will bring new insights.© James Manheim /TiVo

No, no, we're not going to pretend that the repertoire chosen by the Austrian-Persian (the nationality stated on his website... born in 1992) cellist Kian Soltani and the Austrian pianist Aaron Pilsan is completely original: Schubert's "Arpeggione" Sonata, recorded a thousand and one times, and Schumann's Fantasiestücke form the backbone of the record. But what's really remarkable here is Soltani's career: the soloist made his big international breakthrough in 2011 at the age of 19, with triumphant débuts at the Vienna Musikverein, and then First Prize at the International Paulo Cello Competition in Helsinki in 2013. Shortly thereafter he joined Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, firstly as the first solo cellist, and then as one of the soloists in Beethoven's Triple Concerto and Strauss's Don Quixote still with Barenboim. Concerts followed in Berlin, the Salzburg and Lucerne festivals, and the BBC Proms, as a soloist or in a chamber ensemble. A brilliant career, off to a flying start. The album listing finds a touch of originality at the end, with Persian Folklore by the Iranian composer Reza Vali (b. 1952), a piece of writing inspired by Kodály's own translations of popular Hungarian music into classical language. © SM/Qobuz

A few years after the success of her album crossing Baroque music with folk, "Love I Obey", the Franco-American singer Rosemary Standley visits Schubert, this time with the complicity of the Ensemble Contraste: “We all have a few notes of Schubert buried deep inside us,” say the artists, who have got together around his music and brought it to an original sound texture, the result of their varied influences- classical, pop, jazz, folk. They have picked some of the best-known lieder and universally loved instrumental pieces, incorporating in them rhythms from other countries and instruments unusual in this repertory: the jazz trumpet of Airelle Besson, the guitar of Kevin Seddiki, the percussion of Jean-Luc Di Fraja join forces with the viola of Arnaud Thorette, the piano, cello and double bass of Ensemble Contraste - not forgetting the exceptional participation of the soprano Sandrine Piau, who joins Rosemary Standley for several duets. The arrangements are by Johan Farjot. © Alpha Classics

If the global pandemic allows it, the young baritone Andrès Schuen is expected in Papageno (The Magic Flute) at the Vienna Opera in spring 2021. He will be Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in the summer of the same year, and then Guglielmo (Cosi fan tutte) at the Salzburg festival.Hailing from the Italian Tyrol, close by Austria, Andrès Schuen has a solid CV. He studied song under Wolfgang Holzmair and Brigitte Fassbaender, and lieder under Daniel Heide. It is the latter that he has chosen again as a partner for this new album dedicated to the Schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller) by Franz Schubert after the great success of their album Wanderer released in 2018.His fine, youthful and manly timbre works wonders throughout this cycle. It is a voyage through the joy and hope of youth, a joy soon tarnished by the cruel disillusionments of life. In the manner of an actor, and above all, a storyteller, Schuen gradually goes from laughter to tears and resignation. His style is unaffected, with a probity and simplicity that pleases. Accustomed to the Schubertiades of his neighbouring Schwarzenberg which he often visits, Andrès Schuen is supported by the attentive but somewhat matte piano playing of Daniel Heide, specialist in lieder and accompanist to the greatest voices of the day. © François Hudry/Qobuz

At the end of 1822, Schubert learnt that he had contracted a venereal disease. His hopes were "dashed", friendship and love became "torture". He threw all his energy into his work and embarked on the most profound portion of his oeuvre. This was the period of the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, followed in 1824 by the "Rosamunde" Quartet, the Arpeggione Sonata and "The Death and the Maiden" Quartet. He left more and more works unfinished, but everything he did complete now took on a new dimension. His quartets are no longer for "accompanied first violin": they gain in expressiveness, power and symphonic richness. The String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, D. 804, "Rosamunde", was the only one printed and performed in public during Schubert’s lifetime. It is a work uttered in a murmur, with its tremolos, its unison melodies, its modulations. This string quartet is deeply touching in its confidences devoid of vehemence or drama. A nocturnal hymn to yearning, it is fragile and should be performed neither too desolately nor too lightly, always playing on the ambiguity between dewdrops and tears. The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor D810, "Death and the Maiden", is a work dictated by despair. Schubert concurs with Mozart’s remark that death is humanity’s best friend. He composed his quartet in D minor, the key of the Mozart Requiem. The highly dramatic first movement is a struggle for life. In the second movement, Death is accepted. The drama returns in the third movement, now tinged with irony. And the work ends with a Dance of Death, a Presto in the form of a tarantella (the Italian dance invented to cure the bite of the tarantula). The final chord affirms D minor. There is no doubt about the tragic outcome. © La Dolce Volta