A programme of Lieder by Alban Berg and a cantata by K.A. Hartmann,
tender, powerful and haunting pieces from a turbulent era in which not
only the landscape of song was transformed.. If Alban Berg’s earliest
songs found him deeply indebted to Richard Strauss and Debussy, under
Arnold Schoenberg’s tutelage he was on the way to becoming a modern
master in his own right. The “Sieben frühe Lieder” were subsequently
chosen for publication by Berg from around thirty written under
Schoenberg’s critical supervision. Nine other “Jugendlieder” also appear
in this album, variously setting older poets and Berg’s contemporaries,
taking up the language of new music with increasing confidence. “Fully
tonal pasages set off others where the harmony slips from one ambiguity
to another”, as Paul Griffiths notes in the liner text. Two
fascinatingly-contrasting versions of “Schließe mir die Augen beide” -
from 1900 and 1925 – illustrate the vast distance travelled by Berg in
these two decades. “The 1925 setting is excitingly, invitingly strange,
particularly as a response to a late Romantic lyric. But does it render
obsolete the warmth and fluency of the earlier version? Does now
eliminate then, or does it, rather enlarge the sphere of the possible?”
In authorizing the publication of his early songs, Berg obviously found an artistic value in going back. Karl Amadeus Hartmann had other grounds for returning to older material. His Lamento of 1955 was constructed from solo passages in a 1936/7 score for soprano, choir and piano, and was in the original form dedicated to Berg. Lamento was one of many works for which Hartmann had sought no outlet during the Nazi years and which he then felt the need to revise, while maintaining the music’s qualities of protest and mourning. “Lamento is a big piece”,Paul Griffiths writes, “one that thoroughly engages the two formidable musicians who present it here. Juliane Banse is the kind of singer Hartmann must have imagined, one who can maintain ease, power and warmth under difficult circumstances, whose singing conveys at once authority and vulnerability, and whose musical experience runs from Bach to the present day. Aleksandar Madžar similarly brings out the depth of history and the immediacy of feeling written into this work. Yet these artists also convey the desperate silence from which the piece started, when, living through unspeakable times, its composer could only lay down strong shadows for the future.”
In authorizing the publication of his early songs, Berg obviously found an artistic value in going back. Karl Amadeus Hartmann had other grounds for returning to older material. His Lamento of 1955 was constructed from solo passages in a 1936/7 score for soprano, choir and piano, and was in the original form dedicated to Berg. Lamento was one of many works for which Hartmann had sought no outlet during the Nazi years and which he then felt the need to revise, while maintaining the music’s qualities of protest and mourning. “Lamento is a big piece”,Paul Griffiths writes, “one that thoroughly engages the two formidable musicians who present it here. Juliane Banse is the kind of singer Hartmann must have imagined, one who can maintain ease, power and warmth under difficult circumstances, whose singing conveys at once authority and vulnerability, and whose musical experience runs from Bach to the present day. Aleksandar Madžar similarly brings out the depth of history and the immediacy of feeling written into this work. Yet these artists also convey the desperate silence from which the piece started, when, living through unspeakable times, its composer could only lay down strong shadows for the future.”
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