Wilhelm Müller Stefan Weiller

The Austrian composer Wilhelm Kienzl (1857–1941) – also a pianist, conductor, musicologist and writer on music – enjoyed the esteem of his contemporaries particularly for his vocal music. But his star has waned over the past century, and only a handful of his 238 songs have had recent recordings. In style they range from the simple and folk-like to the dramatic and quasi-operatic; their harmonic world likewise embraces both the diatonic and chromatic, with hints of the influence of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner and a foretaste of later composers. The four song-cycles recorded here treat the grand themes of life: love, loss, death and man’s interaction with nature.

Our dreams and secrets are born from our childhood imagination; they are simple, beautiful, serene and limitless. Aren’t we trying to rediscover the spontaneity, plenitude and simplicity of this childhood? I tried to find this state of mind inspired by the soft sound of the flugelhorn and different influences like jazz, classical, cinematic and electro-pop. These are the influences that I encountered during my musical experience. This album was created to share and to pass on this experience. I aspire to create a journey where only the listener knows the destination. Velvet Syncretism was born of this desire.

Wilhelm Furtwängler wurde 1886 als Sohn des Professors für Klassische Archäologie Adolf Furtwängler und dessen Frau Adelheid (geborene Wendt, Tochter von Gustav Wendt) am Nollendorfplatz in Schöneberg geboren, das erst 1920 Berlin angegliedert wurde.

Christoph Prégardien and Michael Gees are, beyond the shadow of a doubt, among the greatest interpreters of Schubert’s song cycle “Die schöne Müllerin”. The cycle deals with a period in the life of a young miller lad as he wanders along a stream in search of work; he meets a mill-girl and falls in love with her; then loses her to another man and, in deep despair, drowns himself in the millstream. “Die schöne Müllerin” - consisting of twenty songs - is an amazing compendium of the human psych which deals with the miller’s emotions as he finds, and then loses, his love.

"Hey everyone, you really should listen to this music!" Fabian Müller was given Brahms's complete piano works on CD as a child, and he would sit in the back of his parentsʼ car on the way to vacation, enraptured by the music of the Hamburg composer. Nothing has changed in his attitude since then.

An unknown oratorio from Johannes Brahms? Since Beethoven it is regarded a standard of musical creation that a composer draws piano songs together into a cycle. Our Brahms program adds a new, unfamiliar variation: solo songs are intertwined with vocal quartets, choirs and piano music.

20 years ago, at the beginning of his career, the young baritone Bo Skovhus made his first recording of Schubert’s “Schöne Müllerin”. Now, as a famous opera and Lied interpreter he presents a new production of all 3 Schubert Cycles: “I’m very thankful to do this again. As a young men you do not reflect so much what happen. Now, when I’m older, I understand much more about. Especially for this cycle it’s important to have another point of view.” (Bo Skovhus) Stefan Vladar, the famous Viennese pianist and his partner on the piano, shows us the virtuosity of the piano part in a new different light.

Peter Mattei has won great acclaim as a singer with unusual dramatic gifts, appearing on the world’s leading stages in complex operatic roles such as Don Giovanni, Billy Budd and Eugene Onegin. On the present release he takes on a no less complex character in the Lieder canon: the traveller in Schubert’s Winterreise. In this cycle, Schubert returned to the poet Wilhelm Müller, whose poems he had set some years earlier, in his other great song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin. Müller’s texts revolve around a young man who after being rejected leaves his village and heads into the desolate, snowy countryside.

Music analysts refer to Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) as the “third B”, after Bach and Beethoven. Although music history frequently labels him as the last German Romantic of the 19th century, his style and his attitude to art need to be understood somewhat more broadly.

Renowned performers Iestyn Davies and Joseph Middleton perform Schubert’s tragic song-cycle Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Maid of the Mill).