The 12 months was 1902 – and Gustav Mahler had simply married Alma Schindler. A track known as ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ (‘Should you love for magnificence’) was provided to her throughout their first lakeside summer season collectively in Austrian Carinthia, the place Mahler’s new summer-house had been accomplished the 12 months earlier than.
Few singers can resist together with this poignantly tender track of their performances of the Rückert-Lieder, although all Mahler’s different settings of the verse of the sensuously Romantic German poet Friedrich Rückert had been written a 12 months earlier than, in that fruitful summer season of 1901 which additionally noticed the composition of two actions of the Fifth Symphony. The 5 Rückert-Lieder (not a cycle, and singers get them organized as they please) transfer from the musical incarnation of the scent of spring blossom, to a meditation on withdrawal from the world, to an existential darkish midnight of the soul. And every track – aside from ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ – was orchestrated simply in the future after its unique piano-accompanied model.
One of the best recordings of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder
Janet Baker (mezzo-soprano)
New Philharmonia/John Barbirolli (1969)
Warner 566 9812
The listener in the present day has two selections to make: do you like the 5 songs sung by a male or feminine voice? And which do you discover extra transferring: the intimate, in-drawing piano-accompanied model, or the plush and aromatic orchestration? Although at present solely accessible both as a obtain or as a part of a five-CD ‘Better of…’ set, the mezzo-soprano Janet Baker’s (proper) orchestral recording with the New Philharmonia underneath conductor Sir John Barbirolli has to stay the head-and-shoulders-above advice. In 46 years, no singer and conductor have proven such rapt musical empathy on this work, and no soloist, male or feminine, has captured fairly the steadiness of passion, fragility, internal anguish and vulnerability as Baker. Her valediction – she locations ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ (‘I’m misplaced to the world’) final – achieves a way of virtually incorporeal spirituality, as she withdraws from the world. Baker’s barely discernible but affecting management of breath, pacing and dynamic nuance is incomparable. She creates the all-important sensation {that a} love, and a way of heightened spirituality reminiscent of this, is probably simply too good to final. This efficiency is balanced completely between large existential horizons and the lyrical intimacy distinctive to those songs.
Christian Gerhaher (baritone)
Gerold Huber (piano) (2009)
RCA 88697 567732
Prime of the record of runners-up comes a male-voice, piano-accompanied model – arguably closest to the primary sounds conceived inside Mahler’s creativeness. The shut partnership between the baritone Christian Gerhaher and his accompanist Gerold Huber reveals that, in the proper fingers, Mahler’s unique piano accompaniments could be each bit as eloquent because the orchestrations. Gerhaher’s responses to German track invariably search out the melancholy subtext of each phrase and musical response, and this efficiency isn’t any exception. His intimate relationship with the style and tone of every fantastically enunciated phrase, and his focus and restraint in revealing the distinctive chemistry of the fusion of poetic and musical sensibility, is as seductive as ever right here.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone)
Berlin Philharmonic/Karl Böhm (1964)
DG 463 5162
Right here, the doyen of baritones meets the doyen of orchestras. This early Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau efficiency is my most well-liked orchestral recording of all these made by the nice singer – sadly, his uniquely intense reside Pageant Corridor efficiency, piano-accompanied by Karl Engel, is at present unavailable. However this one reveals him on the peak of his younger powers, and extra sympathetically carried out than in later variations with both Zubin Mehta or Daniel Barenboim. The projection of phrases, easy and instinctive, and the nuancing of every phrase is at its most delicate and intimate. And nobody reveals the darkish night time of the soul extra dramatically: Fischer-Dieskau chooses to put ‘Um Mitternacht’ final, creating an incomparable crescendo of depth.
Anne Schwanewilms (soprano)
Malcolm Martineau (piano) (2014)
Onyx 4146
Right here is without doubt one of the most up-to-date recordings: a efficiency by feminine voice, and piano-accompanied. It makes its mark due to the uniquely gilded high quality of Schwanewilms’s soprano and to the outstandingly sentient and imaginative piano taking part in of Malcolm Martineau. For moments – within the first two songs, ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’ and ‘Liebst du um Schonheit’ – you assume you wish to hear the music no different method. Schwanewilms and Martineau select unusually sluggish tempos, by which continuously shifting lights and hues gleam by effortlessly sustained melodic traces. The way in which she modulates her voice within the lengthy reaches of ‘Um Mitternacht’ will not be to everybody’s style; however the very sense of disturbance and wrestle convey a potent new perspective to the track.
Illustration by Steve Rawlings
