Dietrich Schwaniz

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a German lyric baritone and conductor of classical music, one of the most famous Lieder (art song) performers of the post-war period, best known as a singer of Franz Schubert's Lieder, particularly "Winterreise" of which his recordings with accompanist Gerald Moore and Jörg Demus are still critically acclaimed half a century after their release.

Cosmopolitan Marlene Dietrich is a terrific 18-track collection that showcases the seductive, sophisticated pop songs Dietrich recorded for Columbia Records. Among the tracks included on the disc are "Lili Marlene," "Mean to Me," "Time on My Hands," "Taking a Chance on Love," "I Never Slept a Wink Last Night," "No Love, No Nothin" and "Miss Otis Regrets."

La Femme Dietrich's career lasted several decades, and when she inked a deal with Decca Records in 1939, her first recording assignment was to produce an album of her "greatest hits," so already pervasive was her fame. This 16-track collection rounds up selections recorded over a 25-year period between her signing to Decca and her later recordings for Dot and Kapp, all of which parent company MCA-Universal now owns. Besides the definitive, elegant orchestral reading of 'Falling In Love Again', Marlene also puts her pipes and personality to other hits like "The Boys in the Backroom" and "You've Got That Look (That Makes Me Weak)" from the movie Destry Rides Again, as well as a batch of classy readings of "You Do Something to Me," "You Go to My Head," and uncharacteristic, almost surreal 1957 rock & roll stabs at "Near You," and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" and the campy spins of her final single in 1965, "If He Swing By the String" and "Such Trying Times." All in all, a great little career overview to add to the pop vocal side of the collection.

Albert Dietrich’s music is only now being revived 100 years after his death. Dietrich was the music director at the Oldenburg Court, Germany, from 1861-1891. His friendship with Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms helped to raise his profile and throughout his lifetime his music was frequently performed. Both Schumann and Brahms valued him very highly as a composer and Brahms often visited Dietrich in Oldenburg to perform with him. To celebrate this forgotten composer’s 100th anniversary, the Oldenburg State Orchestra under their Music Director Alexander Rumpf join forces with two soloists to perform three of Albert Dietrich’s most important works.

Albert Dietrich’s music is only now being revived 100 years after his death. Dietrich was the music director at the Oldenburg Court, Germany, from 1861-1891. His friendship with Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms helped to raise his profile and throughout his lifetime his music was frequently performed. Both Schumann and Brahms valued him very highly as a composer and Brahms often visited Dietrich in Oldenburg to perform with him. To celebrate this forgotten composer’s 100th anniversary, the Oldenburg State Orchestra under their Music Director Alexander Rumpf join forces with two soloists to perform three of Albert Dietrich’s most important works

Albert Dietrich’s music is only now being revived 100 years after his death. Dietrich was the music director at the Oldenburg Court, Germany, from 1861-1891. His friendship with Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms helped to raise his profile and throughout his lifetime his music was frequently performed. Both Schumann and Brahms valued him very highly as a composer and Brahms often visited Dietrich in Oldenburg to perform with him. To celebrate this forgotten composer’s 100th anniversary, the Oldenburg State Orchestra under their Music Director Alexander Rumpf join forces with two soloists to perform three of Albert Dietrich’s most important works

Schubert knew madness. He knew it to the depths of his soul and feared it. And out of his fear he wrote the greatest monument to love lost, to death lost, to madness found. He wrote Die Winterreise, the most hopeless art work ever conceived by the despairing mind of man. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is the voice of Winterreise. In small part, this is because he recorded it seven times between 1952 and 1990. In larger part, this is because he is able to transform himself into the despairing lover. Yet Fischer-Dieskau is still the most lucid and most technically controlled of madmen. As Ingmar Bergman remarked on actor Max von Sydow, "If I'd had a psychopath to present these deeply psychopathic roles, it would have been unbearable". At 55, Fischer-Dieskau returned to Winterreise in 1980, no longer the sad swain or the suicidal lover, but as a man bowed with age and burdened with an interpretive past. His voice far past freshness, Fischer-Dieskau still has something to say concerning Winterreise, indeed, about man's fate. Accompanied by the self-effacing Daniel Barenboim, Fischer-Dieskau sings of the meaninglessness of love of the pointlessness of life.

Throughout his lifetime, Gustav Mahler's musical imagination got sparked by the Wunderhorn anthology of folk poetry compiled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Whether autonomous lieder or conscripted into symphonic service, Mahler’s Wunderhorn settings represent some of his most exotic, exhilarating, but also visionary music. The Wunderhorn songs evoke and celebrate a lost era but they also prefigure its demise. Mahler captures this ambiguity in uncompromisingly melodious and idyllic, but also satiric, relentless and cruel music.

Membra Jesu Nostri (The Limbs of our Lord Jesus) is the single largest and most compelling of the 110 or so sacred vocal works left us by Dutch-German master Dietrich Buxtehude. Buxtehude is better known for his organ music and is rightfully acknowledged as a formative influence on Johann Sebastian Bach. However, Buxtehude's vocal output is slightly larger than that for organ, and he was a key player in the refinement of the German sacred concerto into what we now call the sacred cantata, which he and his wife inherited from its creator and his predecessor, Franz Tunder, in the town of Lübeck. In the years following Buxtehude's death in 1707, German composers of all kinds were gainfully employed writing cantatas in the thousands, Georg Philipp Telemann produced nearly 2,000 of them on his own.