Die Heimlichen Gewinner

Franz Joseph Haydn's Die Schöpfung (The Creation) is one of the greatest oratorios, beloved for its moving religious content and admired for its abundant melodies, stirring choruses, imaginative scene-painting, and colorful orchestration. An argument can be made that period instrumentation and historically informed performance practices give a real boost to Haydn's scoring and effects, in ways conventional modern ensembles can't, and experts in early music make it especially striking by employing the sonorities the composer would have known and wanted.

Colin Davis has recorded a great deal of Haydn's music over his long career, and his late recordings have enjoyed critical and popular acclaim. This live performance was recorded at the Barbican in London in June 2010, when Davis was just short of his 83rd birthday, and for British audiences it has carried overtones of a golden age. In the late 1960s Davis recorded the oratorio Die Jahreszeiten, in its English version as The Seasons, for the Philips label with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and that version remained a fixture of music stores through the late LP era.

Baritone Konstantin Krimmel, voted ‘Best Newcomer’ of the year at the 2023 Oper! Awards in Germany and a member of the eminent Bavarian State Opera company since 2021, presents his third recording for Alpha Classics. In close partnership with pianist Daniel Heide, he places his artistry and his feeling for words at the service of the lied repertory. This is also an opportunity to discover his vision of the work, an unexpectedly contemporary, socio-psychological analysis: ‘ Die schöne Müllerin is a work that romanticises the development of a mental illness, and shows, unfiltered, how a young person can feel without a tempered emotional world. With all its dark sides.’