Globi Und Roger

Bernarda Fink's voice is well suited to the nineteenth century lied; it's warm, full, and intensely focused, with a radiant luminosity over its whole range. She projects a sense of regal composure and a maturity that's not so much chronological as spiritual; you just have the sense that this is a very centered individual. Those qualities, along with her interpretive sensitivity, make this a truly memorable version of Frauenliebe und -leben.

Roger Norrington legt Wert auf einen stets schlanken, dabei aber ausgesprochen erfüllt klingenden Verlauf der Musik - erfüllt im praktisch-klanglichen Sinn, aber auch von der religiös-poetischen Dichte her gesehen. Der wuchtige Eindruck entsteht aus der Intensität jedes musizierten Augenblicks. Obwohl das Klangbild ein wenig wie aus der räumlichen Tiefe kommend wirkt, klingt alles durchsichtig und im über weite Strecken engverzahnt geführten Stimmenverlauf sehr gut gestaffelt und geordnet. Bei der technischen Ausführung bleiben keine Wünsche offen. Ausgezeichnet präsent und intonationssicher bis in die gefürchteten Extremlagen singen die beiden Chöre aus Hamburg und Stuttgart, großartig ausbalanciert spielt das Orchester, eingeschlossen das von Hans Kalafusz völlig uneitel-linear und leicht gebotene Solo im Benedictus, und die vier Solisten bilden ein bestens zueinander passendes Quartett, in dem jeder im günstigsten Licht erscheint.

One of the most fascinating recording projects of this period was Sir Roger Norrington's pioneering set of Beethoven symphonies with The London Classical Players. Here at long last–after a century and a half of neglect–was a conductor bravely determined to conduct these symphonies according to Beethoven's difficult metronome markings, and as played on the original instruments that Beethoven had composed for–that is, the very sounds that he must have had in his mind when he wrote this music down. Norrington astutely saw that Beethoven's original brass and percussion instruments play a crucially prominent role in these symphonies, and most importantly, that they cannot be tempered without diminishing the passionate intensity of the music itself.

The appearance in 1856 of a new edition of a German folksong anthology considered by Brahms to be indiscriminately compiled provoked him to bring out a collection of his own in 1894. His priorities lay not with authenticity; his own selections were governed by the sheer musical and aesthetic quality of the raw material and the opportunities it afforded for imaginative arrangement. So, in his Deutsche Volkslieder, Brahms practised the fine art of assimilation, blurring the lines between folksong and artsong in a way not at all dissimilar to what Britten would be doing for English folksong little more than 50 years later. Images and ambient sounds from the original folksongs find their way into Brahms’s ever-inventive piano accompaniments.