Dorothea Röschmann / Malcolm Martineau PORTRAITS

Dorothea Röschmann releases her new recital album including well known songs by Schubert, Schumann, Strauss and Wolf. She is accompanied by Malcolm Martineau who is recognized as one of the leading accompanists of his generation.

"The idea for this program of female portraits took seed a long time ago, when I was studying in London with the wonderful teacher, Vera Rozsa. I used to make frequent pilgrimages to the extraordinary National Portrait Gallery where one is surrounded by the most imposing portraits of British personalities and royalty, such as the Tudors and Queen Elizabeth I, as well as countless figures from British history – poets, physicians and so on - all concentrated and condensed within the confines of the building.

A portrait represents a very intense encounter with a person and you believe you know them better after having studied the picture for some time. It can only give you a glimpse of the personality, but also creates an impression of how the person wanted to be portrayed. In songs, a portrait is the musical interpretation of a fictionalized person from literature (Gretchen, Mignon), or real life (Mary Stuart), but the process of character portrayal and trying to get deeper and deeper through different layers, has to happen musically. As a portrait, it can only attempt to portray a snapshot of all the emotions of the character but the longer you live with a song, the more you find in it, as in all music.

This fascination with character interpretation in song and in opera, led to my desire to put together a programme with portraits that reflect the finely shaded nuances of the figures presented here. In the same way, female characters such as Mignon and Gretchen, created by Goethe, and Mary, Queen of Scots, have stimulated the imagination of poets, composers and artists alike. We have included songs by Richard Strauss as every one of them can be regarded as a miniature mood portrait.

The original Schubert setting of ‘Gretchens Bitte’ is only a fragment of Goethe’s poem so we have chosen Benjamin Britten’s ‘complete’ version as it gives a more comprehensive characterization of Gretchen." Dorothea Röschmann. (Presto Classical)

Dorothea Röschmann / Mitsuko Uchida SCHUMANN Liederkreis Frauenliebe und Leben BERG Sieben frühe Lieder

For all their radical stylistic differences, Schumann and Berg were composers whose creative personas had much in common. In particular, both were steeped in literature, and both had a lifelong fascination with cryptograms and numerical symbolism of all kinds. But while Berg’s formative years were spent composing virtually nothing other than Lieder, Schumann turned seriously to song only after a decade spent writing almost exclusively music for solo piano. Not by chance, Schumann’s change of direction in 1840 coincided with his long- postponed marriage to Clara Wieck. In that one year alone, as though in rapturous greeting to his bride, he composed around 130 Lieder — a body of work that is sufficient in itself to place him as second only to Schubert in the pantheon of song composers. One of the cycles of that time, Frauenliebe und -leben, to poems by the French-born Adelbert von Chamisso, itself encapsulates the life of a married woman. “I have lived and loved”, she sings in the last of the eight songs, and the cycle traces her journey from first love, through betrothal, marriage and childbirth, to bereavement. Not only does the final number of the cycle end with an almost exact recollection of the piano part of the first song, but Schumann adopts a “closed” form in the majority of the intervening numbers by repeating the opening line (or lines) at the end. The exceptions are those songs whose narrative progression makes such a reversion unfeasible. In the fifth song, for instance, as the bride-to-be bids her sisters farewell, the melody of the opening bars is transformed into a miniature wedding march; and the accelerating pace of the cycle’s penultimate song culminates in a moment of reverie, after which the piano is left on its own to express the exultation of love in a new melody whose flowing quality enhances the dramatic effectiveness of the bleak closing song. That final song, as the loss of the woman’s husband causes a veil to descend over her future, leaves the music open- ended, and a short dissolve leads to the piano’s long reminiscence of the cycle’s opening number. The concluding moments present the piano part exactly as it was in the second verse of the original song. At first, that part had doubled the vocal line; but at the point where the two had diverged, and the piano had assumed a purely accompanimental role, the listener now becomes acutely aware of the missing voice. It is an ending of infinite tenderness, and an overwhelming expression of loss. . .

We'll take for granted the lovely, limpid, not-too-close sound provided by Decca. The singing is exquisite; Röschmann has a silvery, soaring soprano in the Lucia Popp/Margaret Price category, light, bright, pure and shimmering with easy top notes and real intensity without a hint of wobble or scratch. Her diction is ideal and she sings with real passion. Perhaps the most beautiful thing here is her rendering of "Mondnacht", where the delicacy of Uchida's pianism matches Röschmann's poise. Hear, too, the skill with which Röschmann manages the tricky intervals and sustains perfect intonation in "Auf einer Burg" . . . [Uchida's] style suits perfectly both the singer's vocal layout and the mood of the songs, especially the tenderness of "Frauenliebe und Leben", which is given an account to match the best predecessors . . . The haunting Berg songs are creamily sung and make an apt interlude between the two Schumann cycles . . . I cannot imagine any aficionado being disappointed by such musically flawless singing and playing. (Ralph Moore, MusicWeb International / 01. November 2015)

Dorothea Röschmann / Daniel Harding / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra MOZART Arias

20 years after her critically acclaimed début at the Salzburg Festival as Susanna In Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro, Dorothea Röschmann releases her first solo Mozart album, including famous arias from Don Giovanni and Le Nozze Di Figaro. Dorothea Röschmann is in the prime of her voice and referred to "as one of the leading Mozart sopranos today“ (Der Tagesspiegel). The CD track list not only reflects her at her glorious best, but is also a dream come true for Dorothea: “Mozart is the reason I wanted to do opera,” she says. “To be able to embody Mozart figures on stage, that was my dream. His characters are real human beings, with sadness and joy and wit. It’s the whole picture that you get. It sounds strange, but signing Mozart really is a dream come true.” (Dorothea Röschmann in interview with the Guardian). The album is recorded with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by their music director Daniel Harding. (Presto Classical)

Mitsuko Uchida SCHUMANN G Minor Sonata - Waldszenen - Gesänge der Frühe

Japanese-British pianist Mitsuko Uchida continues to impress with recordings that are not so much intellectual as simply well thought out, making a challenging yet extremely satisfying overall impression. Consider the three works by Robert Schumann recorded here. Only the Waldszenen, Op. 82 (Forest Scenes), are well known. The Piano Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, is an early but not immature work, composed in 1830 and supplied with a new finale in 1838 at the suggestion of Clara Schumann, who pointed out that while she could play the original version, few others would be able to. There is already plenty to chew on here, for Schumann incorporates motivic links to the first movement in the new finale. Clara was lukewarm about the work (calling it "not too incomprehensible"), but Schumann himself thought highly of it. The genesis of the work is fascinating; it began with a song Schumann composed in his student days, and Schumann incorporated it into an inner voice of the slow movement. Rather like Beethoven's theater music, it does have the feel of an innovative composer's ideas being forced into an older mold. But Uchida, with her precise yet explosive style, is the perfect interpreter of the work, which seems to spill over the boundaries of sonata form with quasi-improvisatory ideas. Her performance connects the work to the rest of the output of the young Schumann in an ideal way. Also interesting are the Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133 (Dawn Songs), one of the last things Schumann finished before going insane: they are strangely serene little miniatures. The Waldszenen themselves are full of fresh, even daring interpretations. Decca's engineering staff outdoes itself with its capture of an ideal sound environment for the work: not the usual concert hall or studio but the well-known audiophile venue the Reitstadel in the German city of Neumarkt. An essential Schumann release. (James Manheim)