Selig Songs

One of the leading mezzos of our day in a Schubert recital which offers seventy minutes of pure pleasure. The twenty-one songs recorded here are among Schubert’s finest, from ‘Erlkönig’ (written in the composer’s annus mirabilis of 1815) to ‘Leise flehen’ (which dates from his final summer).

When an ensemble seeks to record a complete body of work, there will inevitably be some works of lesser quality among the masterpieces. In the second volume of the Singphoniker's collection of Schubert's complete part-songs for male voices, there are the masterpieces the sublime early version of Gesang der Geister über den Wasser (D. 538) and the transcendent choral version of Sehnsucht (D. 656) and then there are the composition exercises that Schubert wrote for Salieri when he was in his early teens.

The ultimate collection of the complete music of J.S. Bach. Having all of Bach's music at my fingertips is a dream come true. This astonishing collection of music is a historic event. Teldec has compiled an excellent collection of all the works of J.S. Bach, from well-known to the obscure, performed by a wide variety of highly respected musicians. There are many, many treasures included in this collection, for example: the cello suites performed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt now on cd for the first time. And the 4-cd set of chorales is stunning.

Only from the mid-1730s does Bach seem to be concerned with composing songs to contemporary lyrics. We find such a small series especially in the second piano booklet for Anna Magdalena Bach. He and his wife composed some "new songs" that certainly enriched everyday life in the family, such as making music together in the evening or prayers at home with their children. Among these six songs, there are especially those whose lyrics provide comfort.

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.