The Songs Of Johannes Brahms Vol 1 - Angelika Kirchschlager, Graham Johnson (2010)

Graham Johnson’s complete Schubert and Schumann songs series for Hyperion are landmarks in the history of recorded music. Now this indefatigable performer and scholar turns to the songs and vocal works of Brahms. Each disc of this Hyperion edition takes a journey through Brahms’s career. The songs are not quite presented in chronological order but they do appear here in the order that the songs were presented to the world. Each recital represents a different journey through the repertoire (and thus through Brahms’s life). In a number of these Hyperion recitals an opus number will be presented in its entirety (in the case of this disc, Op 48). The folksongs of 1894 will be shared between all the singers in the series.

Hyperion is delighted to present the celebrated mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager in this first volume of the series. She enjoys an international career as one of today’s most important singers, dividing her time between recitals and opera in Europe, North America and the Far East.

Composer: Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager, Graham Johnson

Reviews: One had to wonder how long it would be before completist Graham Johnson got around to Brahms. The answer is before us. After 40 discs encompassing the complete songs of Schubert and, by comparison, a meager 11 devoted to Schumann, Johnson now embarks on a mission to record the entire piano-accompanied songs and vocal works of Brahms. If, in addition to the complete songs for solo voice, he’s also talking about all of the duets, quartets, and choruses, plus the “Magelone” cycle, and all of the Deutsche Volkslieder, Liebeslieder Waltzes, Neue Liebeslieder Waltzes , and Zigeunerlieder , Johnson’s survey will likely fill at least two dozen discs, for there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 items, not as many as Schubert, to be sure, but still an ambitious project.


Such an undertaking presents Graham with a programming challenge, which he is quick to acknowledge right off the bat in his booklet note. A majority of Brahms’s songs are grouped together under collective opus numbers, yet they are not song cycles as we understand the term. We cannot even be sure if he intended them to be performed as integral sets, though a Book 1 reviewed back in Fanfare 30:5, Brahms’s Song Collections , by Inge Van Rij, argues persuasively that harmonic relationships and structural correlations within opus-number groupings do make for a logical case to present all of the songs within a given group together.


The layout of Johnson’s program, to a degree, tends to support Van Rij’s thesis. The songs on the disc are given in ascending opus number order, though the numbers don’t necessarily match up with the chronology of their composition; and in the case of the seven songs that make up op. 48, they are presented complete. But Johnson also yields to the commonsense dictates of putting together a recital that will be sufficiently varied to hold the listener’s interest for more than an hour. Thus, he chooses individual songs from within groupings to stand alone, and even presents one group, the six songs of op. 86, almost complete, dropping the final number of the set, Todessehen . I find no cause to criticize Johnson’s approach, for whatever perceived links there may be that tie the songs within groups together, as he points out, they’re certainly not literary. There aren’t two poems in the op. 86 set, for example, that are by the same poet.


As with his Schubert and Schumann surveys, Johnson follows the text of each song with a detailed description of its narrative and an analysis of its musical setting. So far, cpo has the drop on Hyperion, with nine volumes already released in its Brahms songfest featuring Andreas Schmidt, Juliane Banse, and Helmut Deutsch. Several volumes were reviewed by Bernard Jacobson, and I was favorably impressed with Volume 9, which I reviewed as recently as 33:6. So I wouldn’t count cpo out of the running just yet; but once Hyperion’s survey is complete, all else being equal, Johnson’s album notes alone are bound to make this an invaluable collection.


Finally, we zero in on the chosen singer for this first volume, mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager. At 44, Kirchschlager has chalked up an impressive career. Engagements at Vienna’s Kammeroper and then Graz, where she sang Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier , led to her debut at the Vienna State Opera in the role of Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro . Probably her most notable success came in 2002 when she appeared at London’s Royal Opera singing the lead role in the world premiere of Nicholas Maw’s opera Sophie’s Choice , a performance she repeated in a revised version of the work at the Washington Opera.


Meanwhile, she has racked up an impressive discography of nearly 50 albums ranging in repertoire from Bach to Zemlinsky and several mainstream operas, with bows to Richard Rodgers, Stephen Foster, and Stephen Sondheim in between. Recordings of the many operas in which she has sung have been reviewed in these pages, and hardly a sour note has been sounded by anyone regarding Kirchschlager’s voice, technique, or artistry.


Her winning streak is not about to be broken here. This is a superbly sung collection. In general, Brahms’s songs have never enjoyed the popularity that Schubert’s songs have. For one thing, they’re not as tunefully direct, the course of their melodic lines being often diverted by chromatic excursions; and for another thing, Brahms’s writing for the piano is seldom strictly accompanimental, more often enmeshing the singer in a complex, contrapuntally textured web. But most of all, the emotional and psychological moods evoked by the composer’s musical settings are not always easy to differentiate. This is one of Kirchschlager’s strengths, for in addition to the natural beauty of her voice, bull’s-eye intonation, well-regulated vibrato, and evenness of tone production and breath control, she paints Brahms’s subtly varying emotional states in a contrasting chiaroscuro that makes each song distinct. A great kickoff to a promising new series and strongly recommended.

Tracklisting:

1. Songs (4), Op. 43: no 1, Von ewiger Liebe by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1864; Austria

2. Songs (7), Op. 48 by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: circa 1853-1868; Germany

3. Songs (8), Op. 58: no 4, O komme, holde Sommernacht by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1867-1871; Austria

4. Songs (8), Op. 59: no 1, Dämmrung senkte sich von oben by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: ?1858-73; Austria

5. Songs (8), Op. 59: no 2, Auf dem See by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1873; Austria

6. Songs (9), Op. 63: no 6, Junge Lieder II "Wenn um den Holunder" by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1874; Austria

7. Songs (9), Op. 63: no 5, Junge Lieder I "Meine Liebe ist grün" by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1873; Austria

8. Poems (5), Op. 19: no 2, Scheiden und Meiden by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1858; Germany

9. Poems (5), Op. 19: no 3, In der Ferne by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1858; Germany

10. Songs (9), Op. 69: no 8, Salome by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1877; Austria

11. Songs (4), Op. 70: no 4, Abendregen by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1875; Austria

12. Songs (6), Op. 86: no 1, Therese by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: ?1877-79; Austria

13. Songs (6), Op. 86: no 2, Feldeinsamkeit by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: ?1877-79; Austria

14. Songs (6), Op. 86: no 3, Nachtwandler by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: ?1877-79; Austria

15. Songs (6), Op. 86: no 4, Über die Heide by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: ?1877-79; Austria

16. Songs (6), Op. 86: no 5, Versunken by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1878; Austria

17. Songs (7), Op. 95: no 2, Bei dir sind meine Gedanken by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: ?1884; Austria

18. Songs (7), Op. 95: no 3, Beim Abschied by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: ?1884; Austria

19. Songs (7), Op. 95: no 4, Der Jäger by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: ?1884; Austria

20. Deutsche Volkslieder (12), WoO 35: no 5, Da unten im Tale by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)

21. Deutsche Volkslieder (49), WoO 33: no 35, Soll sich der Mond nicht heller scheinen by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1893-1894; Germany

22. Deutsche Volkslieder (49), WoO 33: no 12, Feinsliebchen, du sollst mir nicht barfuss gehn by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1893-1894; Germany

23. Deutsche Volkslieder (49), WoO 33: no 33, Och Moder, ich well en Ding han by Johannes Brahms
Performer: Angelika Kirchschlager (Mezzo Soprano), Graham Johnson (Piano)
Period: Romantic
Written: 1893-1894; Germany




Thanks to the original releaser