Joseph Gungl

The 37 songs in this recital, written by 27 composers – male, female, English, French, Swiss, German, Romantic, modern and contemporary – bear witness to the richness of Shakespeare’s works to which this recital is dedicated.

Composed in feverish bouts interrupted by long periods of inaction, Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch was brought to completion in 1896. The 46 songs are settings of poems in German by Paul Heyse, after Italian folk songs – miniatures with a duration of less than 2 minutes in most cases. Heyse’s collection numbered more than 350 poems, but Wolf ignored the ballads and laments, and concentrated almost exclusively on the rispetti. These are short love poems which chart, against a Tuscan landscape, the everyday jealousies, flirtations, joys and despairs of men and women in love. Heyse’s translations often intensify the simple Italian of the original poems, and in their turn, Wolf’s settings represent a further heightening of emotion. Miniatures they may be, but many of the songs strike unforgettably at the heart.

Haydn wrote the six quartets of Opp 54 and 55 in 1788, by now a celebrated composer across Europe and still opera Kapellmeister at Esterházy. These period instrument players, whose very name declares their affinity for Haydn, excel in the latest in their Hyperion series. Ever spry in fast movements, faultless in dexterity and intonation, they find a special warmth of feeling in the slower moments: the songful Adagio Cantabile of Op 55 No 1, the puzzling, melancholy Andante of Op 55 No 2, the dark, hymn-like first bars of Op 54 No 2’s Adagio, out of which the violin soars in almost improvised, bluesy reverie. Too many pleasures to enumerate. Try for yourself.

Joseph Keilberth conducts Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 with a stern lyricism not unlike that found on George Szell’s Cleveland recording. Keilberth’s quick tempos, sensitive yet unsentimental phrasing (particularly so in the first movement), and clear textures make the music sound with a compelling freshness and vibrancy that you would better expect from a modern authentic-style performance than one from December, 1966. If anything, the Brahms Second is even finer. A wholly natural flow characterizes this reading, as if the music were a living thing, devoid of any need for interventionist interpretation. Under Keilberth the first movement’s melancholy tinged with joyfulness emerges freely, while the Adagio emerges as a single rapturous, cogent paragraph. Even the studied finale relaxes and sounds less rigorously Beethovenian.

This CD presents a complete recital given by the master violinist Joseph Szigeti in the Hancock Auditorium at the University of Southern California on 13 January 1957. This concert originally formed the last of a series of three concerts featuring works by 20th-century composers entitled ‘Eleven Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century’, which Szigeti performed at numerous college campuses throughout the United States in the late 1950s. He described this three-part series was ‘an incentive to break with the “one-programme-each-season” type of concertizing that the organized audience movement demands.’