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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

Matthias Goerne not only performs at the highest level as a baritone himself, but his piano accompaniments also rank among the Champions League of classical music. For his first album, which was dedicated to Beethoven songs, he brought Jan Lisiecki on board. This was followed by the album Abendrot with melodies by Wagner and Strauss, among others, together with the young talent Seong-Jin Cho. Now we may experience the baritone in duo with the world-class Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, presenting us with a metaphysical program of Berg, Schumann, Wolf, Shostakovich and Brahms.The combination of music and poetry was brought to a climax in the form of the Romantic art song by Franz Schubert. The composers presented here build on this tradition, and despite the wide, temporal span of their publications - there are 135 years between Schumann's Dichterliebe and Shostakovich's Michelangelo Suite - the closeness and significance to the text and its authors is equally evident in all of them. Schumann's Dichterliebe is probably one of the best examples of this: the setting of Heinrich Heine's texts brings together two masters of Romanticism who could not be better interpreted by Goerne and Trifonov. Themes of impossible love and human suffering are unfolded through extremes in the monologue as well as the music, with Goerne maintaining this "strong sensitivity" throughout. In the same vein, the unspoken finds its place on the piano and takes on much more than just an accompanying role in his interpretation - as well as in art song in general. Trifonov is in direct musical dialogue with Goerne, the two artists communicating at eye level.A similar symbiosis is evident in the Michelangelo musical settings by Wolf and Shostakovich. By abandoning tonality in the latter, the connection between piano and spoken word is again reinforced on another level. A unique duo project by two contemporary greats whose paths will hopefully cross more often. © Lena Germann/Qobuz

Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, said England's Independent newspaper, "has had the last laugh" -- Vol. 1 of his Bach cantata series was named Record of the Year at the 2005 Classic FM Gramophone Awards in London, after the big Deutsche Grammophon label pulled out of the project and dropped Gardiner just before it got underway in 2000. No doubt a bit of gloating is appropriate along with justified satisfaction in a tough job well done -- Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists undertook a "Bach cantata pilgrimage," singing all of Bach's cantatas on their liturgically appropriate dates while making a grand tour of acoustically appropriate European churches, many of them with links to the original circumstances in which Bach worked. The recordings, Gardiner said, were "a corollary of the concerts, not their raison d'être" prior to each night's concert, engineers recorded the final rehearsal in situ. By the time these recordings were made in London, the concert series was well under way, and, in the words of bass Dietrich Henschel, the performers "had become spiritually familiar with one another." The results, issued on Gardiner's own SDG label, fully live up to the awards hype. Gardiner's interpretations, though they fall under the historical-performance classification, are personal, subjective, dramatic, and romantic. The program naturally coheres thanks to the common origins of the works in the phases of the liturgical year around which Bach organized his thinking (six cantatas are presented on two discs, three for the Feast of St. John the Baptist in mid-June and three for the first Sunday after Trinity), and every element of the sumptuous booklet presentation contributes to an appreciation of Bach's religious language, as audiences in German churches of the eighteenth century would have understood it. So Gardiner has indeed had the last laugh. But perhaps he would be the first to concede that the difficult birth of this project helped him push classical music toward its future, and even that the music is perhaps better, more urgent, than it might otherwise have been. In place of what would have been a series of implacably standardized albums on Deutsche Grammophon, we will now have releases that are individual, committed, and free. Gardiner's liner notes are taken from journals he wrote during the Bach pilgrimage, and they help bring home the immediacy and excitement of this project. The next step, as recordings like this move online, will be to turn this kind of journal into a blog. The old superstructure of the classical recording industry is collapsing into ruin, but this recording provides some of the clearest testimony yet that new and exciting small enterprises will fill the void. © TiVo

The cantata Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe (Jesus gathered the twelve to Himself) BWV 22, holds a historic place in Bach’s work. Indeed he composed it while still in Köthen, as an audition piece for the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig, and then conducted it on February 7th, 1723, maybe even singing the bass part himself. Famously the city council, unable to convince its preferred composers – Telemann, Graupner and two others –, decided to settle with “mediocre” Bach… The gospel of the day first announces his death and his resurrection by Christ and his disciplines. A modest orchestra: voices, strings, one oboe and continuo, but the musical content is – like in almost all of Bach’s cantatas – amongst the best he’s ever written. For the same celebration, Bach composed a new cantata the following year, Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott (Lord Jesus Christ, true Man and God) BWV 127. But it has almost nothing in common with the previous piece: here Bach offers a very impressive reflection on physical death. Throughout his cantatas he called for a blessed death to free himself from the vicissitudes of life on Earth, but this now reveals how much he may have feared physical death itself. The aria ”Die Seele ruht” is one of these sublime moments suspended in time, an ineffable tintinnabulum, in which the soprano and the oboe dialogue on a harrowing theme while the flutes and string pizzicatos symbolise the passing of time with incredible beauty. Finally it’s with Die Elenden sollen essen (The miserable shall eat) BWV 75 that Bach started off his work in Leipzig, in St. Nicholas Church this time, as the cantatas were alternately performed in both churches. Probably because he wanted to start with a bang, he designed this cantata on a huge scale: fourteen numbers, divided in two parts. Of course Bach would have never been able to produce such vast and powerful partitions on a weekly basis, but there is a real substance to this Passion… and it’s with great passion that Philippe Pierlot, his Ricercar Consort and the soloists perform these masterpieces. © SM/Qobuz

Several years ago, Giovanni Antonini and the Alpha Classics label set an exciting objective: to create a complete collection of Haydn’s 104 symphonies, mirroring the works of composers from different eras so as to highlight their relevance today. This monumental edition should be completed in 2032, marking the tercentenary of the Austro-Hungarian composer’s birth.The project is gradually being enriched by other productions celebrating Haydn’s genius. The oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation) is a major part of his catalogue. Haydn was inspired after hearing an oratorio by Handel in London during a large commemorative concert. The event was significant because there were few early works being performed at the time, and the large orchestra and choir (nearly 1000 strong) made a great impression on Haydn, being unaccustomed to such large numbers.
The result was The Creation, a spirited oratorio that required a colossal amount of preparatory work and left him shaky. But it was worth the effort. The work was a huge success and has been performed ever since. Giovanni Antonini reveals a very lively chamber version with an excellent instrumental ensemble, a perfectly balanced vocal trio with soprano Anna Lucia Richter, tenor Maximilian Schmitt and baritone Florian Boesch, not forgetting the participation of the wonderful Bavarian Radio Choir.This new recording ranks among the highest of a long series of Haydn’s masterpiece. It’s thanks to the radiant performances, where the love of music blends with the simple contemplation of nature. A perfect recording. © François Hudry/Qobuz

In the 18th century, "well-populated" church music was a self-evident tradition throughout central Germany: church services were embellished along the ecclesiastical year with cantatas appropriate to the liturgy for the glory of God, but also for the joy and "spiritual edification" of the visitors. From this treasure of hitherto unknown Christmas music, four cantatas by Ernst Wilhelm Wolf are presented for the first time on this recording. Wolf worked as court kapellmeister in Weimar, and the fact that Goethe rejected him as "self-indulgent" should not prevent us from admiring him as a very important composer of the transition. Musically, Wolf was greatly influenced by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in the sensitive style and by the works of the Berlin Kapellmeister Carl Heinrich Graun. He was also a prolific composer whose works were received with admiration by his contemporaries. The four cantatas show elements of the early classical and sensitive styles; the cantata choruses are often homophonic and songlike, polyphonic sections rather rare. All the cantatas prove to be individually conceived works that testify to the composer's mastery. Beautiful sounding arias, the naturalness of their expression and the dramatic compression in the individual movements are still convincing today. At the same time, the cantatas bear witness to the high quality of Protestant church music in the period after Johann Sebastian Bach and illustrate the high value of music within the liturgy. Today they can be a welcome addition to the repertoire for the Christmas season. © CPO

A is for “Amadeus,” and a recording which marks a return to the source for Quatuor Zaïde, who dedicate their fourth collection to the genius Austrian composer. Z is for Zaïde, a “Singspiel” by Mozart in the style of Die Zauberflöte, which historical transcription for string quartet is a world premiere! Paired with the Quartet in G Major, No. 14, K. 387, this miniature version of one of the most famous operas repeatedly casts each instrument of the quartet in a multitude of lyric roles, celebrating the eternal dialogue between singing and playing. © Nomadmusic

A formidable interpreter of the works of Robert Schumann, the German pianist Severin von Eckardstein here offers an intense version of rare narrative force of one of the most complex cycles of the 19th century, the Davidsbündlertänze Op. 6. This dazzling kaleidoscope of moods is embedded with works by Chopin and Tchaikovsky, of particularly passionate resonance. Great musical moments that confirm Severin von Eckardstein’s status as one of the most poetic musicians in the world of the piano. © Artalinna