Alexander Hermann

'I am an EU singer', Hermann Prey always said about himself. However, by that he did not mean so much his citizenship of a European Union country as the fact that he felt at home in the fields of 'E' and 'U', i.e. in 'serious' and entertainment music alike. For Prey, this distinction never existed, but only the issue of the quality of music, and he found this not only in opera and Lied, but also in operetta, the musical and the well-made hit. For forty-six years Prey convinced audiences; this five-disc collection reveals his fascinatingly wide-ranging repertoire and interpretative skill.

The Passio secundum Joannem or St John Passion (German: Johannes-Passion), BWV 245, is a Passion or oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach, the earliest of the surviving Passions by Bach. It was written during his first year as director of church music in Leipzig and was first performed on 7 April 1724, at Good Friday Vespers at the St. Nicholas Church.

For every musician connected with church music, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is a highlight of the liturgical year, and it was at a performance of this very work that we first met. Playing together in the continuo unit requires a seventh sense for one’s fellow musicians and a heightened awareness of the musical breath of the soloists. In short, it requires non-verbal communication. The feeling of being able to rely on each other, and the perfect rapport in our musical understanding, kindled our desire to record a completely novel kind of music album.

Alexander Zemlinsky composed his Lyric Symphony, Op. 18 for soprano, baritone and orchestra during his time as musical director of the New German Theatre in Prague, where he had moved in 1911 from Vienna. It was generally regarded as his corresponding equivalent to Mahler’s Lied von der Erde and is based on Nobel Prize laureate and most important representative of modern Indian literature Rabindranath Tagore. The work is combined with the befriended and three years older "phantasmogorist" Franz Schreker’s Prelude to a Drama, which is a version of the overture of his Die Gezeichneten. It might be considered symptomatic for the most notable characteristic of Schreker’s music: the dominance of chordal sounds over the melodic element.

We tend to think of Johann Mattheson (1681–1764) as a theorist first and foremost, and as a composer almost as an afterthought. To be sure, he competed in a world in Hamburg that at one time or another featured Reinhard Keiser, Georg Philipp Telemann, and George Frederick Handel; indeed, all of these were friends, sometimes rivals, and in one case, he and Handel even fought a duel over an opera, Cleopatra (Mattheson would have won, but a metal coat button deflected his sword, fortunately both for posterity and Handel). As a singer, he was well regarded, but by 1705 he had traded his performance chops for a real job as private secretary to the English ambassador.