Christiane Iven

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to the Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team.

Mari Takano, from the standard publicity photograph she uses, looks like a soccer mom ready to go out on a date with her husband, taking a phone call in the kitchen before she heads out the door. Nothing in the photo would give you the impression that Takano is a venturesome and fiercely original classical composer who has studied with Brian Ferneyhough and György Ligeti.

…The only source for the `St. Luke Passion' is a score copy begun by Johann Sebastian Bach and completed by his son Carl Phillip Emanuel….Wolfgang Helbich is a persuasive advocate of the score. Good sound, texts and translations.