Fritz Wunderlich

Various Artists - Ten Top Tenors (2015) {2CD Set Decca 482 4025}
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© 2015 Decca Music | 482 4025
Classical / Vocal

This 2CD album brings together ten of the most famous tenors, performing nearly 50 of the greatest arias of all time. It also features a 16-page booklet with everything you need to know about each tenor – nationality, short biography, best recording, trivia and more – in an appealing and witty design.

Albert Lortzings Opern werden leider heute nur noch selten gespielt. Das ist schade, denn zum einen lassen sie sich mit relativ geringem Aufwand sehr effektvoll auf die Bühne bringen - Lortzing war selber Schauspieler und Spieltenor, wusste also, was er sich und seinen Kollegen zumuten durfte.

It is usually the big nineteenth-century opera sets that are bought for their singers; but with a line-up of principals such as we have here Handel too is swept into the golden net. Lucia Popp, two years into her career after her Vienna debut, Christa Ludwig, Fritz Wunderlich, Walter Berry: that is a quartet which in its time may have seemed no more than standard stuff, but at this date looks starry indeed. […] The Orfeo, for one thing, is sung in German instead of Italian; it has cuts, though many fewer than the Mackerras recording in English with Dame Janet Baker; it has the solo voices recorded very close indeed (those that are supposedly off-stage are just about where many modern recordings would have them except when off-stage); and the orchestra sounds, to our re-trained ears, big and thick, with the heavy bass-line that used to seem as proper to Handel as gravy from the roast was to Yorkshire pudding. The roles of Caesar and Sextus, moreover, are taken by men, and there is not a countertenor in sight.

It is usually the big nineteenth-century opera sets that are bought for their singers; but with a line-up of principals such as we have here Handel too is swept into the golden net. Lucia Popp, two years into her career after her Vienna debut, Christa Ludwig, Fritz Wunderlich, Walter Berry: that is a quartet which in its time may have seemed no more than standard stuff, but at this date looks starry indeed. […] The Orfeo, for one thing, is sung in German instead of Italian; it has cuts, though many fewer than the Mackerras recording in English with Dame Janet Baker; it has the solo voices recorded very close indeed (those that are supposedly off-stage are just about where many modern recordings would have them except when off-stage); and the orchestra sounds, to our re-trained ears, big and thick, with the heavy bass-line that used to seem as proper to Handel as gravy from the roast was to Yorkshire pudding.

Mahler considered The Song of the Earth his most personal work, and indeed it is one of his greatest and most moving. Its six sections, sung alternately by the mezzo-soprano and tenor, are set to seven poems from The Chinese Flute, a collection of Chinese lyrics translated into German by Hans Bethge, which echo Mahler's love of nature and contrast the earth's renewal each spring with the transience of human life. Composed after he lost his beloved 4-year-old daughter and was diagnosed with a serious heart ailment, the music encompasses heart-rending anguish and sublime ecstasy; conceived in the shadow of death, it is suffused with a sense of sorrowful, reluctant leave-taking finally transformed into resigned renunciation.

Karl Richter's performance dates from 1965, since when it has seldom been out of the catalogue. It is in an entirely different class… Richter's Munich Bach Choir were at a peak at this time and the results are often quite exciting. Under Richter's direction the ''Ehre sei dir, Gott'' chorus…is appropriately lustig with wonderfully light-hearted singing and orchestral playing… [T]he arias with Gundula Janowitz and Fritz Wunderlich…[are] of a calibre which will always ensure considerable enjoyment…