Carl Loewe

The young German baritone Konstantin Krimmel won the prestigious Preis des Deutschen Musikwettbewerbs in 2019, in addition to the Helmut Deutsch Prize. He joins Alpha for a number of recordings, starting with this programme of lieder conceived with his longstanding partner, the pianist Doriana Tchakarova. This lover of words, a particularly expressive performer in concert, wanted to tell a story for his first album: he chose to record a selection of ballads, because they are genuine operas in just a few minutes… mini-sagas that permit great interpretative freedom. Among the great poets present here are Schiller, Goethe and Heinrich Heine.

The composer (Johann Gottfried) Carl Loewe is familiar to music lovers of the 20th and 21st centuries above all as the writer of important ballad scores, of which Edward, Erlkönig, Herr Oluf and Archibald Douglas are well-known examples. His songs Die Uhr or Heinrich der Vogler were popular hits, especially in a bygone heyday of salon music and educated bourgeois culture. Loewe wrote more than 400 songs. But the same Carl Loewe also wrote six operas, two symphonies and two piano concertos as well as a total of 17 sacred and secular oratorios, all of which have fallen into oblivion.

Of Carl Loewe's oeuvre, his comprehensive Lied edition is best known. In contrast, his two symphonies are rarities that we do not want to withhold from you. Unfortunately, nothing is really known about the exact circumstances of the composition and premiere of the two symphonies. With regard to the E minor symphony, Loewe himself at least left the note that the composition was completed on December 15, 1834. With regard to the D minor symphony, it is assumed that it was composed in 1835. Especially the D minor symphony, which was composed later, comes up with surprises in its formal layout. The instrumentation is very similar to his first symphony in E minor, but the frequent use of four horns is striking, with which Loewe takes a step further towards the typical Romantic instrumentation. When looking at the sequence of movements, the interchange of slow movement and scherzo is striking, and in the harmonic structure Loewe allows himself an extravagant excursion into F-sharp major in the introduction of the fourth movement. The album is completed with Loewe's Themisto Overture, a compressed drama whose atmosphere comes to a head with tremolo surfaces, falling lines and syncopated counter-motives.

The French division of the massive EMI corporation has released a compendium called Les Introuvables de Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (EMI 68509, six CDs), and it contains so much outstanding material that one feels churlish complaining about what it lacks. But here we go. These six discs contain more than 125 lieder, ballads, cantatas and songs – primarily in German, but also in French, Italian, Latin and English – recorded mostly in the 1950s and '60s when Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's voice was one of the wonders of the musical universe.

“The mystery of the ballad comes from the way it is told” - Goethe. This fascinating repertory requires the performer to play each of the characters as he or she would in an opera. Who better than Stéphane Degout to take up the challenge of plunging into the heart of German Romanticism? Fresh from winning a Victoire de la Musique in 2019, the French baritone truly embodies each of the protagonists in these shattering miniature dramas. Beside him here are a longstanding partner and two exceptional guests.