Ulrich Bührle

Few if any composers equalled Schumann in the breadth of his literary taste. His reading encompassed the major figures of European literature in German translation, as Die Weinende, a setting of Byron in his Jugendlieder collection, amply illustrates. The three sets of Lieder und Gesänge in this volume are among his most expressive, the earliest dating from his magical ‘year of song’ of 1840. They take as their subject matter a panoply of romantic concerns: love of nature, the changing of the seasons, parting from one’s beloved, the allure of mermaids, as well as more cheerful strophic songs. This is the final volume in this acclaimed series.

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.

Ulrich Tukur – Mezzanotte
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 330 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Deutsche Grammophon # 477 8796 | Country/Year: Germany 2010
Genre: Pop, Jazz | Style: Chanson

“I just went scrounging”, mumbles Tukur nonchalantly, as though he hadn’t amassed a 78 rpm collection of this music numbering some 2000 records and hadn’t acquired a vast knowledge of the material. “The main thing was finding songs whose melodies I liked and which had to do with night in some poetic and beautiful way. And, naturally, I had to be able to sing them. After all, I don’t have a big, trained voice. It isn’t particularly well suited to big band numbers, alas, but it is quite a good fit for the chansons and cabaret pieces from the first half of the last century.”

London-based producer Ulrich Schnauss and Danish guitarist and producer Jonas Munk have both unfolded their unique visions of electronic music over the past two decades, and they have been collaborating since the mid-2000s. Eight Fragments Of An Illusion is their first album in over four years, their third overall. The latest effort is ambient and introspective in nature, but with a kinetic, polyrhythmic energy pushing it forward. There's a floating quality to Ulrich's synthesizer washes and Munk's guitar patterns, yet the eight tracks are anchored by pulse and compositional direction. The duo brings their individual strengths to the table, yet the music transcends any of their previous work conceptually. There are echoes of blissed-out new age music and kosmische from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as traces of shoegaze-era abstraction and leftfield electronica. But ultimately there's no off-the-rack category that fits it. It exists in its own rarefied space.