Gustav Preihee Von Pohl

Kuhnau’s six Biblical Sonatas are among the most fascinating keyboard curiosities of the baroque. Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722), Bach’s immediate predecessor as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, was a versatile composer, performer and polymath who produced fine works in a wide range of formats. These Biblical Sonatas were written as domestic programme music to illustrate - indeed, to describe - the following Old Testament stories: the Battle between David and Goliath; Saul Cured by David through Music; Jacob’s Marriage; Hezekiah’s Restoration to Health; Gideon, Deliverer of Israel; and Jacob’s Death and Burial.

A finely balanced recording places the voices in ideal relationship with the orchestra which itself is given a well-aired, clean sound (although the Amsterdam sound of 13 years ago for Bernstein is no less truthful). It supports a performance that is predictably – given the BPO/Abbado partnership – shipshape in execution, nothing in Mahler’s highly original scoring overlooked. As is customary with this conductor’s Mahler, the approach tends to be objective and disciplined. In that respect it is at the opposite pole to the concept of Bernstein who, in my favourite version among many available, is more yielding and, to my ears, more idiomatically Mahlerian in mood and in subtlety of rubato, those little lingerings that mean so much in interpreting the composer – yet Bernstein is no slower as a whole.

Johann Sebastian Bach - Weltliche Kantaten BWV 208, 215
Monika Frimmer, Lynne Dawson / Orchestra and Choir of the Age of Enlightenment - Gustav Leonhardt
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 330 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Philips # 454 467-2 | Country/Year: Germany 1998
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque, Vocal, Secular

…Leonhardts first public performance took place in 1950, when he performed J.S. Bach's The Art of the Fugue for a Viennese audience. This marked the beginning of a legendary and influential career that would take him to performance venues all over the world, setting stylistic and interpretive standards for keyboard music dating from the early 1500s to the late 1700s. His treatment of the works of Couperin, Froberger, and Frescobaldi were pivotal in affecting a shift in Baroque performance practice from the motoric to the malleable…

Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde is a symphony of six songs, usually performed by a tenor and a mezzo-soprano or baritone, as specified in the score. This 2017 Sony Classical release features superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann as the soloist throughout, so the expected alternation of singers is replaced with one artist's unified interpretation. Joined by Jonathan Nott and the Vienna Philharmonic, Kaufmann displays a phenomenal tessitura that enables him to sing the tenor songs with great intensity while losing little of that power in his lower range. Even so, there is a qualitative difference between Kaufmann as tenor, where his tone is penetrating and heroic, and Kaufmann as baritone, where his voice is much rounder, warmer, and intimate.

This recording was made under the direction of Reinbert de Leeuw in December 2019, two months before his death. A few weeks before that, he had called Thomas Dieltjens, artistic director of Het Collectief, to tell him: ‘Since our concert in mid-July 2019 at the Saintes Festival, I’ve been haunted by Das Lied von der Erde". I’m totally under its spell, and every day I discover new things in this masterpiece by Mahler. Wouldn’t it be a dream if we could record this music with the outstanding group of instrumentalists and soloists we had in Saintes? And preferably as soon as possible?’ Reinbert himself made the arrangement for fifteen instrumentalists and two soloists and invested all his remaining strength in the recording of this music, which encompasses the whole of life, from the freshness of birth to the moment of farewell… A testamentary album, with the moving mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot, which gives us an opportunity to pay tribute to one of the key ambassadors of twentieth-century music.

Vladimir Jurowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin continue their exploration of Mahler with a new recording of Das Lied von der Erde, on which Dame Sarah Connolly and Robert Dean Smith provide the vocal contributions. Residing somewhere between symphony and song cycle, Das Lied is one of Mahler’s most profound and loved works, marking an important step in the composer’s career, as well as in his private life. Jurowski approaches the piece as Mahler’s deliberate move from a “heroic” Beethovenian model towards a more “lyrical”, Schubertian attitude.