Strauss: The Complete Songs, Vol. 3

（不足10人评分）

126人收藏

4条评论

共25首歌曲

在网易云音乐打开

艺人: Richard Strauss
语种: 德语
厂牌: Hyperion Records
发行时间: 2008年04月01日
专辑类别: 录音室专辑

专辑介绍

Recording details: July 2007

All Saints' Church, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom

Produced by Mark Brown

Engineered by Julian Millard

Hyperion’s Strauss Lieder series is fast becoming a worthy successor to the seminal Schubert and Schumann Lieder sets on the label. This third volume features the brilliant young British tenor Andrew Kennedy, whose performances in concert, in operas and on disc have received the highest praise. Hearing Strauss’s songs sung by a tenor is a wonderful and rare experience, and brings a different colour to even the most well-known songs on this disc. This recording fills in some of the gaps left by the first two volumes. Together with them it completes the eights songs of Opus 10, the six songs of Opus 19 and the five songs of Schlichte Weisen Op 21. It also presents two groups, Opus 17 and 32, complete as originally published, and it ends with three songs from Opus 48. Altogether the selection covers the eighteen years from 1882 to 1900, during which Strauss composed all his major tone poems. Roger Vignoles performs with his usual matchless musicianship and provides the extensive booklet notes.

When contemplating the songs of Richard Strauss it always comes as a surprise how early in his career most of them were written. The songs in this volume were all composed between 1882 and 1900, at which date his first successful opera, Salome, was still five years in the future. However, he had by then composed all the great tone poems, which together with the songs could be seen as the laboratory in which Strauss developed the techniques that would later serve him so well as an opera composer.

There is no doubt that the same qualities that endear him to the opera-going public—lyricism, harmonic richness and vocal allure—are those which have found most favour in his songs. And yet, in between the undoubted hits are many songs that deserve to rank as far more than undiscovered trifles, as should be evident from the present selection, which fills in some of the gaps left by the first two volumes. Heard together, they give a far broader picture of Strauss as a Lieder-composer than would be gleaned from most recital programmes, which tend to relegate him to the status of dessert—the Sachertorte and Schlag, so to speak—designed to send the audience home replete and happy.

What for instance could prepare one for the bleak landscape of Sehnsucht or the enigmatic brooding of Aus den Liedern der Trauer? Then there is the grandly conceived paean of Anbetung—not quite in the first rank, but glorious for all that—and the exhortatory sweep of Nur Mut!. In some of the more intimate songs Strauss hits an unexpected vein of tenderness that is rare in the Lieder repertoire. In each case it involves a particular view of girlhood or womanhood—Das Geheimnis, Wozu noch, Mädchen, Die Frauen sind oft fromm und still.

A similar tenderness can be found in Himmelsboten, the gently humorous dawn serenade from Des Knaben Wunderhorn with which Strauss brings the five songs of Opus 32 to a close. This group is recorded complete, as are the six songs of Opus 17, which include the justifiably famous Ständchen. It is illuminating to hear this song in the company of the five other settings of von Schack that surround it. Coming between Seitdem dein Aug’ in meines schaute and Das Geheimnis it seems less of a showstopper, more part of an ongoing narrative, with echoes of its piano figuration re-emerging in the glittering oar-strokes of the final Barkarole.

Many listeners will only be familiar with Strauss songs as sung by sopranos. This is not surprising, given the obvious affinity Strauss had for the female voice, and the extraordinary allure with which he was able to clothe it. And yet to hear a song like Ständchen sung by a tenor gives it a different import. For obvious reasons of gender, it brings the song closer to the message of the poem and further from the kind of meretricious display into which Strauss and his interpreters can sometimes fall.

In the pantheon of Lieder composers Richard Strauss, like Gustav Mahler, is often placed somewhat apart from the big four—Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Hugo Wolf. He is charged with poor literary taste—but so can Brahms be, who like him set the poets of his time as he found them—and with facile brilliance. Strauss himself admitted to pot-boiling from time to time, and there are other occasions, such as Anbetung, when the sheer size of the conception seems to overflow the bounds of the Lied proper. And yet the way he goes about inflecting the text and infusing it with poetic meaning is squarely in the tradition of his great predecessors and at its best is a fair match for their genius.

Strauss: The Complete Songs, Vol. 3

专辑介绍

最新简评（共4条）