ORFEO International – Reviews

Important Releases Briefly Introduced

November 2007

It seems that no rung is too high on Diana Damrau‘s career ladder: after being made a Bavarian Kammersängerin during the summer of 2007, she is currently appearing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, alternating in the roles of Pamina and the Queen of Night and renewing her links with a house that has now become something of a second home to her. But the soprano‘s countless appearances in the great opera houses of the world have not prevented her from continuing to cultivate the intimate form of the German art song on the very highest level, and her recital at the 2006 Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg was greeted with a standing ovation. This was the first time that
ORFEO CD C 749 071 ADiana Damrau had worked with Helmut Deutsch, one of the foremost lieder accompanists of our day. As one might hope from artists of this calibre, singer and pianist succeeded at once in communicating not only with each other but also with their audience, an impression amply confirmed by the present live recording of a thoroughly Romantic programme that also includes several rarities and explores a number of byways of the repertory. Not only Robert and Clara Schumann are represented by their own groups of lieder, so too are Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny. Two settings of poems by Heinrich Heine, Die Lotosblume and Lorelei, demonstrate the flexibility of Diana Damrau and Helmut Deutsch in switching between subtle hints and a narrative tone that is charged with tension. The soprano also rose to the challenge of learning a number of Chopin‘s Polish songs in their original language. Diana Damrau has too few opportunities to demonstrate her Francophilia in the opera house, with the result that Liszt‘s settings of poems by Victor Hugo are all the more welcome in that they also flatter the ear of the listener. And in Brahms‘s folksongs, too, Diana Damrau and Helmut Deutsch reveal themselves to be stylistically assured and imaginative interpreters keen to narrate these miniature stories.