Haydn: The Seasons / Muller-Kray, Wunderlich, Engen, Giebel
SWR
CD
$13.49$26.99Save 50%Apr 24, 2012
In April 2012, the Schwetzingen Festival celebrates its 60th birthday. On this occasion, a very special oratorio recording from the festival's early years has been selected - a vintage performance of Haydn's "The Seasons", featuring the immortal Fritz Wunderlich!
Haydn wrote his oratorio "The Seasons" between the years 1799 and 1800. The work is based on the poem "The Seasons" by James Thomson in the German translation of the Baron van Swieten. The contemporary descriptions of nature and genre scenes are a work of perfection, insuring the composition's enduring popularity.
This early festival recording is a true time-capsule, recorded on May 24th, 1959 featuring in addition to Wunderlich, the vocal artistry of Agnes Giebel, and Kieth Engen, who together bring Haydn's secular oratorio to vivid life.
This release is the 10th in a unique collection of popular German songs, performed by Fritz Wunderlich, this album focusing on recordings from the 1950's and 60's. It is well known that Wunderlich was an exceptional singer, yet it never fails to surprise when hearing him singing works from different genres and discovering how he developed from his early performances to later in his career. This album focuses on the recordings which began his career and the sames repertoire which he later returned to with a more mature sound and approach. Both this release and all future volumes contain recordings that Wunderlich made for the company from which SWR grew. They are only available here.
Franz Schubert's rarely performed opera, more appropriately dubbed a Singspiel, Fierrabras, is heard here in a fine-sounding, well-sung 1959 Bern, Switzerland radio broadcast concert performance that features the one and only Fritz Wunderlich in the leading role. One of Myto's bestselling titles despite the lack of name recognition of nearly every other cast member, this recording of Fierrebras returns to the marketplace where its competition is slight and interest in anything Schubert is and will always remain high.
