Growing up in Vienna, with its great Lied tradition, Hans Gál had written about 100 songs before leaving secondary school. He later destroyed them, along with all his other works composed prior to 1910, but between 1910 and 1921 he wrote many more. Except for the five songs of Op. 33, these were never published, and Gál himself would later refer to them as ‘laid aside’. Many of these songs were publicly performed at the time, however, often with the composer at the piano. Through the initiative of Christian Immler and Helmut Deutsch, 26 of the ‘laid-aside’ songs are now being made available to a modern audience. A labor of love for the performers, the project has had the support of the composer’s family – in fact the recording was produced by Hans Gál’s grandson, Simon Fox-Gál. The songs provide a missing link in Gál’s creative development, and show him engaging with a wide variety of poets, extending back from the twelfth-century (Walther von der Vogelweide) to contemporaries, such as Hermann Hesse and Richard Dehmel, by way of the classics (Heine, Mörike). Reflecting a taste for the exotic which was fashionable at the time, the selection also includes settings of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. The performers close their recital with the Op. 33 set, the only songs that Hans Gál did publish during his long career.

REVIEW:

This is a treasure-trove of songs in the tradition of Richard Strauss, melodically radiant and full of sensitivity to atmosphere. Immler is ideally suited to them, with expansive, radiant tone and splendid diction; Helmut Deutsch sets his peerless pianism at the disposal of composer and singer.

– BBC Music Magazine

This release concludes the CPO exploration of the song oeuvre of Johannes Brahms. Time of course has taken nothing away from the enduringly high value of the song interpretations by top artists like Juliane Banse, Ingeborg Danz, Andreas Schmidt, Christoph Prégardien, and others. Already the sheer quantity of twenty duets and twenty-seven quartets as well as the eighteen Liebeslieder-Walzer and fifteen Neue Liebeslieder-Walzer still mostly designed as vocal quartets clearly demonstrate that settings for more than one solo voice have an important place in Brahms’s lied oeuvre. Although the quartets in principle were written for ensembles of soloists, from the very beginning choral performance for presentation in the concert hall formed an alternative that at least was tolerated by the composer. While Brahms himself could not decide about the ideal ensemble dimensions, solo or choral, for the two series of Liebeslieder-Walzer, for the Quartets op. 64 he even expressly reckoned with the possibility, as he stated to his publisher, that the settings “occasionally would be sung by a little choir.” Things were different with the duets: they belonged to the core inventory of middle-class home performance in the nineteenth century and were even more strongly anchored there than the solo lied beginning in the 1850s, when the increasing number of lieder recitals meant that this song form more frequently found its way to the concert hall.

Includes work(s) by Baldassare Galuppi, Alexander Arkhangelsky, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dimitri Bortniansky, Alexander Gretchaninov, Pavel Chesnokov, Alexander Nikolsky. Ensemble: National Cathedral Choral Society Washington, D.C.. Conductor: J. Reilly Lewis.