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

At the Hotel Waldhaus Sils-Maria in St. Moritz, Switzerland -- the very model of a fin de siècle European resort hotel nestled in the foothills below an Alpine mountain range and beloved of guests ranging from Richard Strauss to David Bowie -- there is a working Welte-Mignon piano that is kept in good tune. The selections on the Welte rolls it plays suggest that both instrument and rolls were acquired when the Waldhaus opened in 1908, and at that time the Welte was regarded as one of the wonders of the age, able to reproduce the playing of the world's great pianists with astonishing clarity and accuracy. Tudor's Welte-Mignon Piano: Hotel Waldhaus Sils-Maria, Vol. 2, is packaged with a cover in keeping with its venue, a royal blue digipak as handsome as would be a menu from the Hotel Waldhaus' restaurant. The ambiance of the room in which it was recorded is quite suitable; slightly reverberant, but not too much, and the piano sounds like it is in generally good repair. To be able to sit in this hotel and listen to its Welte must be a genuinely magical experience. To listen to it on a CD, however, is a different story. This particular Welte mechanism is rather clunky, and despite what the liner notes -- which are a kind of mixture of promotional bluster and damage control -- state, there is no great mystery to the Welte system such as the notes describe and there are technicians who know how to tweak a Welte, not to mention expert operators to get the best playback out of one. Overall, the annotators write as though the Hotel Waldhaus owns the only Welte and rolls in the world and that is quite simply not so. They even suggest that some of the clunk owes to the performance tradition of the era; certainly rubato and other effects that tend to retard or otherwise break down a continuous flow of music were more prevalent then than now, but the extent to which it is heard on this disc is ridiculous. Although Vladimir de Pachmann could be highly eccentric and willful in pieces like the Mozart Rondo Alla Turca heard here, the mechanism renders his playing as though it were your eight-year-old nephew or elderly aunt who dusts off the piano in the parlor once in awhile. That said, this disc does have a couple of desirable items, pieces one is likely to hear only on piano rolls; Jósef Wieniawski's glittery Konzertwalzer, Op. 3, and Sydney Smith's churchy Second Fantasia on Martha, Op. 119. However, much of the rest can be frustrating; while one is grateful to hear Arthur Friedheim's roll of Mendelssohn's "Sadness of the Soul" (aka, the Song Without Words No. 22) -- a performance not included on Nimbus' first-rate 1998 CD devoted to Friedheim's rolls -- the roll is played too slowly, lugubriously galumphing along. As a souvenir of a unique mechanical instrument in an exotic place, Tudor's Welte-Mignon Piano: Hotel Waldhaus Sils-Maria Vol. 2 is wonderful, but as a forum for the great pianists whose rolls are included here, it is something of a bust, albeit a very well recorded one.© TiVo