ORFEO International – Reviews

Important Releases Briefly Introduced

March 2007

The latest CD in our series devoted to contemporary lieder features works by not one but three composers. The names of the two friends Luigi Dallapiccola and Karl Amadeus Hartmann are closely associated with the renaissance of the avant-garde in the wake of the Second World War, an event that had reduced both men to a state of silence when they withdrew from public life. The third composer included in the present recital is Wolfgang von Schweinitz, who was born in 1953 and who shares with his two older colleagues the desire to privilege music’s claims to expound a humanitarian message alongside a firm grasp of compositional technique. The singers who are heard in these songs all enjoy an outstanding reputation both as lieder recitalists and as committed exponents of modern music. As such, they are representative of all the singers who have been involved in the present series of studio recordings during its ten-year history.

Claudia Barainsky has contributed to several previous recordings in the series and in that way has helped to shape its artistic profile.
Luigi Dallapiccola
Foto: ORFEO InternationalShe brings to Hartmann’s Lamento – a setting of texts by Andreas Gryphius – a well-controlled vibrato and the greatest possible precision in the tricky intervals in which the score abounds. A completely different approach is adopted by Doris Soffel, who offers a no less ideal interpretation of Schweinitz’s cycle Papiersterne with Aribert Reimann as her accompanist, thereby recreating the partnership that gave the work’s first performance. Singer and pianist pay the closest possible heed to the rich motivic allusions and details in the dense interplay between the music and Sarah Kirsch’s words. The narrative tone of Dallapiccola’s Rencesvals – based on episodes from the Old French Chanson de Roland – is well captured by Dietrich Henschel, an experienced Schubertian who is also capable of rising to the moments of violent lament. In moments like these, Axel Bauni is not only an equal partner but sometimes even an adversary challenging the singer to give even more. Together with Aribert Reimann, Bauni is the editor and driving force behind Orfeo’s Contemporary Lieder Series. Bauni is also the pianist in Hartmann’s Lamento and Dallapiccola’s Quattro liriche di Antonio Machado, to which Mojca Erdmann brings her fresh-toned, agile and idiomatically secure soprano voice.