Goethe Schubert

The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team. The third volume devoted to settings of poems by Goethe includes the best known song of all, Erlkönig. These songs for male voice range from 1814 to the 1820s, some in Goethe’s preferred strophic form, others through-composed.

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. For the first time, the listener and interested reader can follow Schubert’s textual alterations and can appreciate the importance the written word had for the composer.

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.

All is emotion and refinement in the interpretations of the soprano Raquel Camarinha and the pianist Yoan Héreau. On this disc, they introduce us to an atypical and little-known sector of Chopin’s output, revealing the beauty of his Polish songs, haunted by the torments of exile and love. By placing them alongside the Lieder der Mignon, which include some of Schubert’s finest settings of Goethe, the duo achieves an extremely rare symbiosis between poetry and music.

This was to be the end of the line for Italian word-setting by Viennese composers: once the confident sentiments that belonged to the poet Metastasio's opera seria felt the chill and threatening wind of Enlightenment and Revolution, their time was up. Even we, for the most part, prefer to remember the German-speaking Beethoven, Schubert and Haydn. So it is good to be reminded of their responses to the Italian muse (usually as part of their craft-learning student work) in this particularly well-cast recital. Central Europe, in the person of Andras Schiff meets Italy, in Cecilia Bartoli, to delightful, often revelatory effect.

“I have heard an angel sing,” wrote Schubert after he heard Paganini play in Vienna in 1828. Vilde Frang, partnered by pianist Michael Lifits, juxtaposes and links works by these two violinist-composers, who lived vastly different lives, yet are musically connected. Both found inspiration in the human voice and Frang sheds new light on Schubert’s demands for virtuosity and on Paganini’s sensitive musicality.

This is a beautiful, heartwarming record. Schubert's part-songs, originally written for friendly gatherings at home, have never received the recognition they deserve, perhaps partly because he himself underrated them. Yet their extraordinary variety of mood, character, and texture, (often within a single song) and the inspired melodies, harmonic surprises, and magical modulations, are vintage Schubert.

"In the typically genial 2 CD collection of Schubert duets, trios and quartets are resurrected golden age stereo analogue recordings made in 1973. These come to 25 works, all piano accompanied. The artists are the elite of the day. The only name unfamiliar to me was the tenor Horst R Laubenthal. No corners are cut with the notes which have been freshly penned by Malcolm Macdonald. On the other hand there are no texts or translations.

She's not shy, this Anne-Sofie von Otter. Her performances are, to say the least, incredibly expressive. Her Suleika I (D. 720) is Brigitte Bardot in Contempt. Her Im Abendrot (D. 799) is Kim Novak in Vertigo. Her Totengräbers Heimweh is Eli Walach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Nor is von Otter dumb. Her interpretations are sly, subtle, and very, very sensitive. Her Der Wanderer an den Mond (D. 870) is hearty and lightly but profoundly philosophical.

The Grosses Festpielhaus in Salzburg has been the scene of countless memorable musical events - operas, concerts and recitals - for 50 years. Here is a unique chance to celebrate the glories of this distinguished era. In an exceptional collaboration with the Salzburg Festival, we have prepared a 25-CD box set - 5 complete operas, 10 concerts and 2 recitals - featuring many of the world's greatest artists, in recordings with classical status and others that are appearing on CD for the first time. Concerts (five out of ten are first-time releases): with Abbado, Bernstein, B hm, Boulez, Karajan, Levine, Mehta, Muti, Solti.