Vondung

Some of Schumanns early songs, such as Lied für xxx, show the influence of Schubert, but it was in 1840, his Year of Song, that Schumann fully turned his attention to vocal music. The Zweistimmige Lieder, Op. 43 were the first that he composed after his marriage to Clara Wieck, and many of the songs from this time set texts on the subject of love. Schumanns literary background and cultivated tastes mean that any such collection of his songs reads like a catalogue of the greatest poets of his time, with the tragic narratives of Mörike and Heine in the Romanzen und Balladen, Op. 64 as powerful as any opera.

In celebration of the 150th Anniversary this Album focus on still less-known but exceptional sensitive and impressive Choral Symphonic and Orchestra songs by Max Reger. With these works, Reger entirely adhered to the trend of the time; the large-scale idea, which would have had no place in the operas of the period, is transferred to the concert hall, so to speak, and is as far removed from the "simple" orchestral song as some of Mahler's Rückert-Lieder. The Hebbel Requiem, Op. 144b includes audible parallels with Johannes Brahms‘s German Requiem and was Reger’s memorial for the German soldiers killed in the war.

Pentatone presents a new album full of world-premiere recordings of orchestral songs by Hans Sommer, sung by an excellent quartet of soloists – Mojca Erdmann, Anke Vondung, Mauro Peter and Benjamin Appl – together with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under the baton of Guillermo García Calvo. Sommer was a Liszt student whose operas were performed and praised by Richard Strauss, but sunk into relative oblivion due to his unusual career path and independence from major publishers. The songs were discovered recently and can finally be presented to the world. Focusing mostly on Goethe poetry, combining high Romanticism with folk styles, Sommer’s songs are colourfully orchestrated, harmonically audacious, and often highly dramatic and evocative.