Juliane Banse / Martin Helmchen HINDEMITH Das Marienleben

The German soprano Juliane Banse has sung the Lieder of Brahms, Schubert, Wolf, Ullmann, Strauss, Schumann, Loewe and Berg, earning a reputation for both the quality of her interpretations and the warmth of her timbre. She and her regular partner Martin Helmchen, who has just joined Alpha, have chosen to record Paul Hindemith’s song cycle Das Marienleben, composed in 1923 and revised by the composer in 1948. A bewitching, sometimes disturbing cycle whose texts, taken from the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, retrace the life of the Virgin Mary. Fifteen poems, fifteen episodes tinged with mysticism and lyricism. They proved to be the ideal inspiration for Hindemith, whose compositional style here draws on both the power of Wagner’s operas and the subtle nuances of Debussy.

Juliane Banse / András Schiff SONGS OF DEBUSSY AND MOZART

One of the recurrent highlights of András Schiff’s chamber music series at the Mondsee Festival over the last decade has been his duet performances with Juliane Banse. The singer first went there, at the pianist’s invitation, in 1994. “I just sang five Mendelssohn songs with him then, but we realized right away that we were a good team,” says Ms Banse. Since then the duo has been a special commitment, a project returned to whenever crowded itineraries permit. “Songs of Debussy and Mozart” is their first album together.

A spontaneous, fresh approach, and an exchange of new ideas and insights in the music, has characterized their work. “The extraordinary things about working with András Schiff are that there are no rehearsals in the conventional sense; there’s no writing in the margin of the score, and fixing details and approaching the work the same way each time, none of that. It’s very different every time, which makes the live situation very exciting. Many new things always happen. If I have a new idea – and sometimes I’ll do things I’ve never done before - I know he’ll be able to accommodate it…”

Debussy songs have formed part of Banse/Schiff’s core repertoire from almost the beginning of their association, and were obvious choices for their first ECM recording, but Banse also felt that Mozart’s songs are consistently undervalued in contemporary recitals and chose to cast a fresh light on them.

“Generally the songs don’t get the attention they deserve. We wanted to put Mozart in the centre of the recording.” In bringing together songs of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Claude Debussy they uncover perhaps surprising ‘similarities’ between the composers. The mood is intimate, the atmosphere consistent. The French songs of Mozart including “Dans un bois solitaire” and “Oiseaux, si tous les ans” form one  bridge to Debussy’s world. “Both composers are very delicate in the expression of feeling in their songs” says Banse, “both very personal, and they both give so much from themselves.” Connections are stressed by Banse’s forthright approach to the Mozart. “You have to dare to sing the Mozart lieder as if they were impressionistic songs – then they suddenly become what they really are.” (ECM Records)

Juliane Banse IM ARM DER LIEBE

Juliane Banse's current concept album, entitled "Love’s Embrace”, is devoted to orchestral Lieder of the early twentieth century and presents works and composers who have been very unjustly forgotten. The romantic lyrics have catchy melodies and lightweight orchestration; they are easily on a par with the well-known orchestral Lieder by Mahler or Strauss. An excellent opportunity to regain familiarity with Late Romantic orchestral Lieder by Hans Pfitzner, Joseph Marx, Walter Braunfels and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and to experience them in exemplary interpretations.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Golden Age of the orchestral piano Lied and the original orchestral Lied had begun - with Hugo Wolf and, above all, Gustav Mahler. “Away with the piano!" was the latter's fierce demand: "We moderns need a larger device to express our thoughts, whether great or small.” Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Reger thought and composed in very much the same manner as such now-forgotten and soon to be finally rediscovered masters as Joseph Marx or Walter Braunfels.

In 1903, Pfitzner, for example, wrote his song "Infidelity and Consolation", which alternated between the popular sound” and artistic contrapuntal ambitions, and then orchestrated it: a "German folk song" from the pen of an intensely cerebral composer. In contrast, the Six Simple Songs op 9, composed from 1911 onwards by Erich Wolfgang Korngold - a childhood as well as a teenage prodigy - are by no means "simple"; instead they are artificial, refined, lightweight, melodically extravagant and harmoniously dazzling. The Graz composer Joseph Marx, once the most-performed living Austrian composer, represents the aspect of modernity that usually comes under the heading of “Late Romantic”; like Hugo Wolf, he also wrote music for an "Italian songbook" after Paul Heyse. The highly delicate "Three Chinese Songs" composed in the world war year of 1914 by Walter Braunfels, who was open to all the fine arts, were written for soprano and orchestra from the outset - but not merely as a footnote to once-fashionable exoticism. Like Mahler with his "Song of the Earth," Braunfels had been inspired by Hans Bethge's "Chinese Flute".

Together with the Münchner Rundfunkorchester conducted by Sebastian Weigle, Juliane Banse recorded the orchestral Lieder in a studio production by the Bayerischer Rundfunk in March 2015.

Juliane Banse / Aleksandar Madža ALBAN BERG - KARL AMADEUS HARTMANN Tief in der Nacht

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.”