Christian Magazine

Although highly productive and respected in his lifetime as a composer of Lieder, Robert Franz (1815–92) has since become a peripheral figure in music history. One reason may be that he avoids dramatic contrasts and instead aims at an emotional ambiguity: ‘My representation of joy is always tinged with melancholy, whilst that of suffering is always accompanied by an exquisite sensation of losing oneself’, he once wrote to Liszt. As a consequence his music appeals to those who are able ‘to admire the nuances of a charcoal drawing without longing for the colours of a painting’, to quote from Georges Starobinski’s liner notes to this recording. As they began to explore the songs of Franz, Starobinski and the baritone Christian Immler were moved by their findings to devise a programme which includes 23 of the composer’s often quite brief songs. Using the poet Heinrich Heine as their guiding star, they present these – all Heine settings but from different opus groups – in the form of two ‘imagined’ song cycles.

Director Sven- Erich Bechtolf “has again delved deeply into music and text”, observed the opera magazine Opernnetz in its rave review of the performance captured here. “In Rolf Glittenberg’s beautiful Jugendstil salon, he is constantly in touch with the heartbeat of the story […] As Ariadne, Soile Isokoski radiates enchanting vocal beauty as she forms endless nuances in one blossoming phrase after another. Daniela Fally sings the gruellingly difficult part of Zerbinetta with great flexibility, acting it with nonchalant coquettishness.

This new album conducted by Nicholas Collon continues Ondine’s award-winning series of orchestral works by Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994) together with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. The series has gathered several accolades, including a Grammy nomination, a BBC Music Magazine Awards nomination, as well as several recording of the month awards and best recordings of the year nominations. This album includes the composer’s early hit, his folklorish masterpiece Concerto for Orchestra, which is among his most performed compositions. The album also includes Partita for Violin and Orchestra (with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist), a virtuosic 5-movement work which in its orchestral version is not short of a Violin Concerto. The rarity in the album is Lutoslawski’s Novelette from 1979, which, although fragmentary, is already pointing toward the ideas of his 3rd Symphony.