There are two alternative
ways of recording songs: having mixed
selections chosen by the artists, as
in a recital, or in groupings for publication
as made by the composer. In their complete
survey of the Brahms songs, CPO have
chosen the latter route, which is too
rarely found. It certainly helps the
collector to know what is going on,
and it helps also as far as searching
out reference material is concerned.
Not that the latter is so important
as far is this issue is concerned, since
CPO have provided lengthy introductory
essays on the music, and there are full
texts and translations, nicely laid
out, and using paper thick enough to
be able to read just one side at a time.
If the packaging is
above average, so too are the performances.
For these artists clearly know and love
the songs they perform. The recording
engineers have also captured them and
their accompanist, Helmut Deutsch, in
an ambient and truthful perspective,
with results that are most compelling.
These songs are more
likely to be performed as selections
than as quasi-cycles, but it still makes
abundant sense to gather them as here
for the purposes of recording. This
is particularly so as concerned the
five songs of Opus 84, and for various
reasons. The first three are settings
of poems by Hans Schmidt, composed in
1881, whereas the other two derive from
folk songs, and are somewhat earlier.
So why are they gathered together? The
answer lies in the performing options.
They can be sung by a single voice,
to be sure; but Brahms also gave the
option of a duet approach, since the
texts have a conversational style. It
is this latter option that is found
here, which characterises the music
to the full. The booklet, in its typically
thoughtful way, makes it clear exactly
who does what, although it must be admitted
that the back cover details are mistaken
in suggesting that there are six songs
in the collection rather than five.
In the Schmidt settings
the two women offer a subtle yet compelling
contrast of timbre, whereas in the two
folksongs Banse’s soprano and Schmidt’s
bass are strongly contrasted, after
the manner well known from Mahler’s
celebrated Des knaben Wunderhorn.
In the Opus 85 and
86 collections it is the latter who
feature again, but now with just the
one voice to a song. And in the latter
set only the brief opening song, Therese,
to words by Gottfried Keller, is taken
by the soprano. The remainder are allocated
to Schmidt’s dark and characterful baritone
voice, as is the case too in the five
songs of Opus 94, which could have been
composed with his splendid voice in
mind.
Contemporary with the
Fourth Symphony, Brahms’s Opus 98, the
Opus 94 songs find Brahms at the height
of his powers. The imagery is compelling,
at once dark and powerful. Brahms’s
friend Theodor Billroth described the
‘melancholy bitterness’ of Friedrich
Halm’s poems (on which three of the
songs are based), and he found their
willingness to confront the major issue
of life and death a compelling experience.
The fusion of words and music is certainly
profound in its effectiveness, and there
are abundant subtleties in the way that
the central theme is treated. The final
song, Kein Haus, keine Heimat (No House,
No Home) is both austere, dramatic and
brief. It concerns the dark thoughts
of a hero who commits suicide in order
to save his former mistress, who is
just a fickle young girl. In the brevity
lies the expressive intensity, the very
profundity, of this wonderful song by
one of the great song composers. Andreas
Schmidt is a master of this repertoire,
affording due credit to a composer whose
achievement in this field is too often
overlooked.
Terry Barfoot
Juliane Banse (soprano) 