…die Lieder von Hans Eisler zum Beispiel liegen nur von Fischer-Dieskau auf Platte vor, und so zeugt die vorliegende Produktion von Engangement und Mut, wenn der Bass-Bariton Ulrich Schütte und Gary Holt sich dieser Musik annehmen. Doch Schütte weiß bei dieser schwierigen und schwerblütigen Musik wesentlich mehr zu überzeugen und trifft die Stimmung mit dem dunklen Timbre seiner Stimme genau.
MDG is delighted to announce the second volume of their critically acclaimed Eisler Lieder recordings. In 1948 Hanns Eisler returned to Europe from exile in the United States, where he had found refuge from the National Socialist regime. On his return he found hardly any traces of the Germany he had left in 1937 and expressed his feelings of grief and loss in many choice songs ? some of which Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher have selected for the enthralling and exemplary program on this second volume of their Eisler edition.
Hanns Eisler composed more than five hundred songs, and his very first extant compositions include songs with piano accompaniment. On the fourth and last volume of their selections from Eisler’s songs, Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher focus on his early works and bring to light an absolutely astonishing discovery: the young Hanns was an autodidact who had an incredible feel for the song part, and his artistic aspirations are also evident in the piano part.
From 1920s Vienna and the Berlin of the Weimar Republic to emigration to the USA, then back to Vienna after the defeat of Nazism, to end his days in East Berlin: Hanns Eisler’s life was one long exile against the backcloth of the artistic, technical, and political revolutions of the 20th century. Distance, irony, and melancholy are the aesthetic corollaries that characterise the lieder presented here, their atmosphere often evoking the despair of those dark times. The early piano sonata gained the young Eisler an admiration that has never dimmed since.