Baritone Christian Gerhaher is the outstanding Lieder singer of our time & here, he presents his first 'concept' album. An album which juxtaposes compositions from...

Baritone Christian Gerhaher is the outstanding Lieder singer of our time & here, he presents his first 'concept' album. An album which juxtaposes compositions from the two great Vienna schools - Viennese Classicism represented by Haydn & Beethoven, plus the Second Viennese School with Schonberg & Berg. Gerhaher is accompanied on the piano by his permanent duo partner Gerold Huber.

REVIEWS:

A quite extraordinary disc. Rush out and buy it!

"The great baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau set the standard for German lieder singing over a generation. With his recent death, the mantle surely passes to the equally accomplished Christian Gerhaher – but what a contrast of styles. Rather than a purely beautiful voice, Gerhaher's approach is intently text-focused, making the consonants sound as strongly as the vowels, responsive to every twist and turn of the poetry. He feels a deep affinity with Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens, and this wonderfully programmed sequence of the first and second Viennese schools takes in Haydn and Berg before ending with Beethoven's aching Adelaide, perfectly sung."

-- Nicholas Kenyon, The Observer (UK) [6/16/2012]

This is a wonderful disc, the finest song recital to come my way in some time, as much for the well curated choice of repertoire as for the quality of the musical vision. Gerhaher and Huber give us a summation of the German Lied tradition, encompassing what many would see as its very beginning and its very end. The First Viennese School is represented by Haydn and Beethoven, while the Second gets cycles from Schoenberg and Berg. What in some hands might seem polar opposites here become complementary halves, and one turns to one School with new ears, having been refreshed by knowledge of the other.
 
Any new disc from Christian Gerhaher is an event, something to get excited about, as he is one of the finest Lied singers we have today. You can take the beauty of his tone for granted: it’s silky, gentle, warm and very beautiful, a worthy successor to the likes of Fischer-Dieskau. What sets him out as special, however, is the supreme intelligence with which he combines his vocal tone with interpretation of the words. He sounds as if he is creating this music not just afresh but almost for the very first time. In fact there is an exploratory, almost tentative nature to his singing that is incredibly compelling, at times nigh heartbreaking. Nowhere is this more effective than in the final song of An die Ferne Geliebte, where the poet tenderly uses his songs to eliminate the distance between himself and his “distant beloved.” The early stanzas of the song are shot through with almost unbearable longing, which then transforms into triumphant hope with the return of the opening motif in the final verse. It turns the cycle from something beautiful into something transcendent, confirming this as what is for me one of the finest interpretations of the cycle on disc.
 
So how do Gerhaher and Huber deal with the prickly challenges of the Second Viennese School? Triumphantly! The most surprising and, in many ways, the most interesting part of the disc is Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Gardens cycle. This, I suspect, was particularly special to Gerhaher, as he accompanies it with a special essay in the booklet, tracing the development of the poetry and even using a diagram to illustrate the emotional arc of the cycle. His honeyed voice gets right inside Schoenberg’s illustration of love awakened in a heady, almost dangerous context. Gerhaher inhabits the ebb and flow of the passion to an uncanny degree, unlocking the wave of expression to an extent that is almost unsettling for the listener. Huber’s accompaniment comes into its own here, picking out Schoenberg’s atonal piano writing with exploratory precision, painting with notes in a way that is every bit as effective as the singer’s. The whole experience reeks of the sensuous, perfumed world of fin-de-siècle Vienna and, lest that seem clichéd, it has an uncanny ability to leave the listener emotionally drained.

Gerhaher and Huber pay the Haydn songs the great compliment of taking them seriously, and the intensity of the performances pays rich dividends, especially in Das Leben ist ein Traum whose direct poetry and simple melody are elevated into something very special by a performance of concentration and vision.
 
Rush out and buy it!
 
-- Simon Thompson, MusicWeb International