Robert Franz

Although highly productive and respected in his lifetime as a composer of Lieder, Robert Franz (1815–92) has since become a peripheral figure in music history. One reason may be that he avoids dramatic contrasts and instead aims at an emotional ambiguity: ‘My representation of joy is always tinged with melancholy, whilst that of suffering is always accompanied by an exquisite sensation of losing oneself’, he once wrote to Liszt. As a consequence his music appeals to those who are able ‘to admire the nuances of a charcoal drawing without longing for the colours of a painting’, to quote from Georges Starobinski’s liner notes to this recording. As they began to explore the songs of Franz, Starobinski and the baritone Christian Immler were moved by their findings to devise a programme which includes 23 of the composer’s often quite brief songs. Using the poet Heinrich Heine as their guiding star, they present these – all Heine settings but from different opus groups – in the form of two ‘imagined’ song cycles.

Mark Padmore and fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout combine here to perform two of Schumann’s major cycles to words by Heine. They also throw in a selection of five Heine settings by the largely forgotten Franz Lachner (1803-90) from his Sängerfahrt (Singer’s Journey), which include the same text – ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’ – with which Schumann’s Dichterliebe begins.

Le roman est construit autour de trois personnages-clés et méconnus : l'étudiant en médecine Robert Klopstock, sa concubine Dora Diamant et sa soeur Ottla Kafka. D'autres figures de la légende kafkaïenne sont également présentes : Milena, Max Brod et Prague. Le récit passe des sanatoriums austro-hongrois au New York des années 1970, en passant par les fantômes de la Mitteleuropa. …

This elegiac music seems very well-suited to the dark sound of the viola. Kashkashian plays it simply and very expressively, without slides or sentimentality; glowing and shimmering, her tone is pure, warm, inflected. The program has great variety. Britten's mournful Lachrymae (Reflections on a Song of John Dowland) comes to an agitated climax and ends with an old chorale. Vaughan Williams's Romance is a peaceful pastoral; Carter's Elegy is somber, gentle, and hardly dissonant; Glasunov's Elegy is very romantic. Liszt's Romance is very rhetorical–half recitation, half lamentation–but ends serenely.

Following the release of several operas by Franz Schreker during past years on cpo (some of them in premiere recordings), our label now turns to the orchestral works of a man who in some circles continues to be dismissed as a mere 'sound magician', even though he was a melodist and harmonist of the first water and had learned his craft so thoroughly at the Vienna Conservatory that he himself became a sought-after teacher. The present program traces Schrekers path from his studies with Robert Fuchs to his first enduring success the captivating pantomime The Birthday of the Infanta (1908) after the fairy tale by Oscar Wilde, which definitely numbers among the finest creations of the musical art nouveau.

Admired for his fusion of German and Italianate musical elements, Johann Simon Mayr is increasingly recognised as one of the most intriguing and influential composers of his time. His Requiem in G minor is shrouded in compositional obscurity but it is clear that the published version is surpassed both in scale and instrumentation by the elaborate edition performed here, which has been assembled from the autograph manuscripts. Small sections were composed by Donizetti and then corrected by his teacher, Mayr. Church style and more Romanticised elements are finely balanced in this important example of Mayr’s compositional language.