Download or listen to the best albums and artists of Art Songs, Mélodies & Lieder

By turns ecstatic and deeply depressed, as is the way with bipolar disorders, Hugo Wolf gave the world great and precious masterpieces in the genre of the lied with his great cycles, in particular Italienisches Liederbuch, for two voices, which represents the soul of the art. 46 lieder speak of love, focusing on the tangled feelings of man and woman across lovers' dialogues in ironic, gallant and impassioned tones. Written around words by Paul Heyse based on anonymous Tuscan poems, this collection is full of ballads, and in particular rispetti (compliments), folksy poems made up of two quatrains. The German translation seriously disfigures the light touch of the Italian original, especially as Hugo Wolf makes no attempt to "do Italian" in his compositions. “I assure you: a warm heart beats in the little chests of my youngest southern children, who, despite everything, cannot hide their German origins. Yes, their hearts beat in German, even though the sun shines in Italian", he told a friend. This Italian collection is made up of, as Stéphanie Goldet writes, "little love stories, moments of impatience or frustration, wishes and warnings, complaints and recriminations, demands and unconditional surrenders". Recorded in concert at the Hesse Philharmonic on 18 February 2018, this new recording ranks alongside other legendary records such as those by Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau; it will surely become a new reference point version. While it was reasonable to worry about Jonas Kaufmann's voice, we can hear that it has recovered all its strength and its thousand and one miraculous nuances. His partner, Diana Damrau, is radiant, with a song that brings together the many different emotions of a worried and sometimes mischievous young girl. But this dialogue would be nothing without the subtle and refined piano-playing of Helmut Deutsch, who has given these miniatures such an irresistible accompaniment. © François Hudry/Qobuz

As the first of a series of publications that aim to celebrate forty years of the "Arts Flo" founded by William Christie in 1979, this new album, recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2016, is made up of "serious songs and “drinking songs" from France in the 17th century. Following the filming of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea, performed at the Salzburg Festival 2018, and the ambitious complete recording of Carlo Gesualdo’s Madrigaux conducted by Paul Agnew, who is little by little taking over as the ensemble’s conductor, new editions are returning towards harmonia mundi, the "historic" publisher of the Arts Florissants and their founder. This recording is a perfect “Map of Tendre” of the loved-up 17th century, with its lovelorn shepherds, pretty shepherdesses (jolies bergères, in fact!) who aren't always too chaste, and helpful birds. Having only just moved on from Renaissance polyphony, French composers, very much influenced by their Italian colleagues, produced airs de cour (courtly airs) which would become the first constitutive elements of French opera. This album brings together the composers who best represent this musical trend. It gives us Marc-Antoine Charpentier as well as Michel Lambert, who wrote serious melodies, and Sébastien Le Camus, who would quickly become one of the musical favourites of the Parisian salon scene. These men dominated the musical productions which then circulated in either printed or manuscript form, or in periodicals such as Le Mercure galant. What a happy time it was for France, when love, sincere love, always won out over adversity and jealousy. © François Hudry/Qobuz

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Bernstein, Copland, Ives, Mahler, Strauss, Pärt, Duruflé, Messiaen, Martin, Liszt and Richard Rodgers: those are the composers honoured here by Anne Sofie von Otter, accompanied on the organ (which makes the album truly original, in addition to the eclectic repertoire) by Bengt Forsberg. A few fellow musicians join forces for a few pieces here and there; we find the violin, cello, harp, viola and even an electric guitar for Bernstein's Mass aria. A touching detail is that the organ used is that of St. James Church in Stockholm, the same church where a very young Anne Sofie first started singing, initially as a member of the choir, then quickly as a soloist, notably with St. John Passion. It was also in this church that she first performed as a soloist more than thirty-five years ago with none other than Bengt Forsberg. The programme alternates between English, German and French, with a touch of Latin for incursions into the sacred world. It ends with an almost improvised version of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" from the musical The Sound of Music; indeed, Von Otter has been enjoying crossing the barriers between periods and genres for several years now. © SM/Qobuz

Very different from Schubert’s Lieder, which are chants according to German “popular” tradition (usually strophic) with a musical accompaniment subservient to the singing (taking nothing away from their incredible genius!), Schumann’s are, to use Christian Gerhaher’s words, “lyrical dramaturgy”; miniature operas in which the piano and vocals are equal in content. This doesn’t explain why Schumann’s Lieder are so rarely performed in concert, with the exception of some well-worn cycles (normally Myrten, Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und –leben). Gerhaher and his pianist Gerold Huber pick works from the genre’s ample repertoire that have almost never been performed in concert. Only three cycles date back to the “Liederyear” of 1840 (incidentally the year of his marriage to Clara Wieck), while the others are from the composer’s last years, beyond 1850, and are full of nostalgia… This is far from the dishevelled romanticism of his early years, the mood is dark and the discourse broken up into small brushstrokes. The contrast from one era to the other is striking. Gerhaher and Huber perform these surprising marvels brilliantly. © SM/Qobuz

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Remembering Gounod as just a masterful composer of great French operas, it’s easy to forget that he also wrote, among many various pieces of work, close to one hundred and fifty melodies throughout is long and rich career. Surprisingly, almost one third of these pages were written in English (during his years in London, between 1870 and 1874), about fifteen of them are in Italian, as well as a few in Spanish and German. Most of them of course are in French, among which Tassis Christoyannis and Jeff Cohen selected twenty-four gems, a comprehensive array ranging from his very first published melody – his Où voulez-vous aller from 1839, the year of his Prix de Rome! – to his À une jeune Grecque of the utmost maturity, in 1884. The composer explored all of the styles he held dear, with all the eclecticism he’s famous for: French romanticism, German Lied, orientalism, old-fashioned archaic writing… Gounod was particularly sensitive to the words’ meaning as much as their sound, the back and forth of verses and the variety of periods, and excelled in finding a melodic movement to perfectly fit the inflexions of pronunciation, the expressive flow of speech and setting the perfect phrasing for an eloquent result. With him, unlike his illustrious elder Berlioz, music served the words, carried them and elevated them if possible. Let’s discover this beautiful pearl rosary, made of works we would love to hear in recital more often. © SM/Qobuz

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“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

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