Composer: Edvard Grieg
Performers. Katarina Karneus (mezzo), Julius Drake (piano)
Label: Hyperion
Recording details: December 2007, All Saints, Durham Road, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom
Tracklisting
Sex digte af Henrik Ibsen ‘Six poems by Henrik Ibsen’, Op 25
1 No 1: Spillemænd ‘Minstrels’ ‘Til hende stod mine tanker ‘My thoughts were with her” [2'28]
2 No 2: En svane ‘A swan’ ‘Min hvide svane ‘My white swan” [2'25]
3 No 3: Stambogsrim ‘Album lines’ ‘Jeg kaldte dig mit lykkebud ‘I called you my messenger of joy” [1'47]
4 No 4: Med en vandlilje ‘With a waterlily’ ‘Se, Marie, hvad jeg bringer ‘See, Marie, what I am bringing” [2'14]
5 No 5: Borte! ‘Gone!’ ‘De sidste gæster ‘The last guests” [1'49]
6 No 6: En fuglevise ‘A bird’s song’ ‘Vi gik en dejlig vårdag ‘We walked one lovely spring day” [2'49]
Sechs Lieder, Op 48
7 No 1: Gruß ‘Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt’ [1'09]
8 No 2: Dereinst, Gedanke mein [3'05]
9 No 3: Lauf der Welt ‘An jedem Abend geh’ ich aus’ [1'38]
10 No 4: Die verschwiegene Nachtigall ‘Unter den Linden’ [3'45]
11 No 5: Zur Rosenzeit ‘Ihr verblühet, süße Rosen’ [3'08]
12 No 6: Ein Traum ‘Mir träumte einst ein schöner Traum’ [2'21]
Haugtussa ‘The mountain maid’, Op 67
13 No 1: Det syng ‘The singing’ ‘Å veit du den Draum og veit du den Song ‘Oh, if you know the dream and if you know the song” [4'02]
14 No 2: Veslemøy ‘Little maid’ ‘Ho er mager og myrk og mjå ‘She is thin and dark and slender” [2'48]
15 No 3: Blåbær-Li ‘Blueberry slopes’ ‘Nei sjå, kor det blåner her! ‘Just look, how blue it is here!” [2'59]
16 No 4: Møte ‘Meeting’ ‘Ho sit ein Sundag lengtande i Li ‘She sits one Sunday longingly on the hillside” [4'16]
17 No 5: Elsk ‘Love’ ‘Den galne Guten min Hug hev dåra ‘That crazy boy has ensnared my mind” [2'43]
18 No 6: Killingdans ‘Goats’ dance’ ‘Å hipp og hoppa ‘Oh, hip and hop” [2'01]
19 No 7: Vond Dag ‘Hurtful day’ ‘Ho reknar Dag og Stund og seine Kveld ‘She counts the days and hours and late evenings” [2'52]
20 No 8: Ved Gjætle-Bekken ‘By the Gjætle brook’ ‘Du surlande Bekk ‘You swirling brook” [6'13]
Hjertets melodier ‘Melodies of the heart’, Op 5
21 No 1: To brune Øjne ‘Two brown eyes’ [1'13]
22 No 2: En Digters Bryst ‘A poet’s heart’ ‘Du fatter ej Bølgernes evige Gang ‘You do not understand the waves’ eternal motion” [1'32]
23 No 3: Jeg elsker Dig ‘I love you’ ‘Min Tankes Tanke ene Du er vorden ‘My thought of thoughts you alone have become” [1'33]
24 No 4: Min Tanke er et mægtigt Fjeld ‘My thoughts are like a mighty mountain’ [1'22]
25 Prinsessen, EG133 [3'44]
Hyperion is delighted to present a disc of Grieg’s songs. Grieg’s sheer range as a song-writer—from the shortest settings, folk-like and immediate, to the depth of distinctive inspiration that runs through every bar of the major cycle Haugtussa—places him without question among the finest masters of the genre. Arne Garborg’s verse-novel Haugtussa created a deep impression on Grieg. The resulting marriage of poetry and music is one of the miracles of the nineteenth-century song-cycle genre. Many regard this work as Grieg’s masterpiece: it is certainly one of the greatest song-cycles for the female voice ever written, revealing the composer at the very height of his powers.
These matchless examples of Scandinavian Romanticism are performed by the partnership of Swedish mezzo-soprano Katarina Karnéus and pianist Julius Drake, who drew great critical acclaim for their disc of Sibelius songs.
What the critics say
Tim Ashley The Guardian, Friday 11 July 2008 4 Stars
Grieg wrote more than 180 songs, of which only a handful, exasperatingly, remain in the repertory. Language is, of course, the source of both their greatness and their neglect. Grieg’s aim was to invest the Norwegian art song with the status – national, as well as aesthetic – of the German lied. That he succeeded is borne out by every track of this beautifully programmed disc featuring Swedish mezzo Katarina Karnéus and pianist Julius Drake. We get to hear old favourites like A Swan and I Love You, in the context of the works from which they were subsequently wrenched, along with Haugtussa (The Mountain Girl), a shattering cycle. Karnéus’s performances are thrillingly awash with grand passions and high voltage drama. Drake is faultless.
Richard Nicholson/www.classicalsource.com
The public reputation and status accorded to winners of the “BBC Cardiff Singer of the World” competition is durable but historically does not immediately provide a head-start to an international career. Nor does it lead to a rapid avalanche of recordings. Katarina Karnéus is a not untypical example of this phenomenon. She won the competition in 1995 but her recording career has been rather slow to take off. Her EMI recital was not released until 1999 and further recordings have been surprisingly limited: lyric mezzos are hardly at a premium.
A projected complete set of Grieg songs was initiated as long ago as 1993 on BIS, but its issues have only been trickling out. They employ a single singer, the Finnish-Swedish mezzo Monica Groop; she was coincidentally a contestant in the 1989 Cardiff Competition. Hyperion is not in direct competition for this is a self-contained collection and not a random selection; it is a well-planned recital.
The centrepiece of the programme is the “Haugtussa” (The Mountain Maid) cycle, already recorded by a number of distinguished Scandinavian mezzos. Karnéus yields to none of them in vocal accomplishment, indeed the tessitura fits her vocal figure ideally. In the opening song ‘Det syng’ she is comfortably at home in the contralto register that Grieg has used to embody the grave utterances which begin each stanza, yet able effortlessly to float a higher line for the reassurance which follows each time.
The characterisation of the central figure Veslemøy is vivid but not artful. In ‘Blåbær-li’ the playfulness of her relationship with her flock is endearingly conveyed and her reactions to threats from predatory foxes and wolves light-heartedly declared. We hear her tone change from genial to indignant, her facial expression from a smile to a frown, before the dream of being approached by a handsome boy brings an audible twinkle to her eye (swiftly banished by thoughts of her pastoral duties). Her sexual awakening has been foreshadowed, however, and it is to be the dominant theme of the latter part of the cycle. Few songs in any language can convey the immediate physical impact of an encounter with a potential mate than ‘Møte’. Having established the sultry atmosphere in the opening lines, Grieg, in a blaze of sound involving both singer and pianist, depicts the girl being overwhelmed by a massive blush. Then the next stage of their relationship is adumbrated in ‘Elsk’, where her unselfconscious and high-spirited infatuation is accompanied by fears of his indifference, the former expressed in light-hearted dance-rhythms, the latter by the full weight of the piano in a typically expressive union of singer and accompanist.
The charm and bounce of this performance of the ‘Killingdans’ (Goats’ Dance) is as infectious as any I know. ‘Vond Dag’ could not be more contrasted, with the voice part constantly trying to rise but repeatedly sinking into depression amidst the accompaniment’s remorseless dark chromaticism. This performance reaches a compelling apotheosis in ‘Ved Gjaetle-Bekken’. Subtle variations within the strophic design can be traced: Karnéus’s colouring of her tone to express changes of feeling in each verse, the differing weight applied to the refrain, the pianist’s small-scale differences of touch and broader harmonic shifts, all coming together in the last verse, with its hesitancy and its ambiguous postlude.
The variety of style and expression in the cycle comes across gratifyingly. With the boiling-down of Garborg’s seventy-one poems to eight, Grieg had to strictly condense Veslemøy’s story. He successfully constructed a coherent narrative, setting the scene, introducing the character of his central figure, relating the course of her relationship with Jon and hinting at her submission to the spirit-world in the final song, even finding room for humour and frivolity on the way.
Karnéus and Drake never leave any doubt of the continuity of the cycle. They also bring out similarities with other song-composers: the lively volatility of some of Richard Strauss’s lighter songs in ‘Blåbær-li’, the resemblance to “Die schöne Müllerin” in Veslemøy’s dialogue with the stream in the last song ‘Ved Gjoetle-bekken’, even a pre-echo of Mahler’s demotic style in ‘Killingdans’. However, Grieg’s individuality is always present. This is a searching performance, which promises to yield more with each further hearing.
The Ibsen poems whose settings comprise Grieg’s Opus 25 are generally gloomy and are often associated with an unhappy period of Grieg’s family life. They include the well-known ‘En svane’ and ‘Med en vandlilje’. The latter is an exception to the prevailing tone, being animated, with the piano doubling the voice in its generally ebullient motion. Karnéus can produce the necessary eagerness of manner. In ‘En svane’ mellowness of tone in the lyrical outer sections is supplied alongside powerful declamation in the central passage. A similar pyramid structure applies in ‘Stambogsrim’. The singer’s richness of tone is never vitiated by strain at the top, even in the loud, intense writing.
The six songs to German texts are heterogeneous and markedly different from the melancholy ethos of the Ibsen settings. Heine is represented by the exuberant, lightweight ‘Gruss’, in which Karnéus shows her ability to swell her tone smoothly from piano to forte and back. A complete contrast is provided by Emanuel Geibel’s solemn ‘Dereinst, Gedanke mein’, in which the singer inhabits the alto register and the words are heavy with meaning. Then the whimsical ‘Lauf der Welt’, with its playful trotting rhythm, piano-doubling of the melody and knowing pointing of the words by the singer, immediately set off by a mediaeval lyric of courtly love by Walther von der Vogelweide, into which Grieg inserts archaic decorations. Goethe’s ‘Zur Rosenzeit’ is given quasi-Wolfian treatment, with an independent piano part, unconventional intervals and weighty chord progressions, while the vocal line goes very low.
The Opus 5 songs (Melodies from the Heart) are really miniatures, reflective of Grieg’s happiness at his burgeoning relationship with his future wife, light but not slight. While Grieg’s harmonic language has yet to develop, the individual cut of his melodies can already be detected. The inevitable ‘Jeg elsker Dig’ receives an understated performance, without the inauthentic second verse.
Collaborating with Julius Drake can do nothing but amplify a fine artist’s output both in the recital room and in a recording. He is a sovereign accompanist and an incredibly industrious one. I seem to encounter him everywhere when asked to review concerts and recordings, covering a wide range of the song repertoire.
Hyperion previously showed typical judgement and enterprise in including Karnéus in its admirable song series with an issue of Sibelius songs. This recital suggests that the slow maturing process has paid off: the Karnéus of today has a voice of wide range, secure tone and confident delivery – she is a musician with searching interpretative skills.
The recording seems a fraction less forward than others from this venue, which is by no means to its detriment. Texts and translations are provided in the booklet.
William R Braun, Operanews.com, Dec 2008
Along with the advent of the compact disc and its extended playing time came the mania for integral recordings of every corner of the repertoire. The Hyperion label has been at the forefront of this movement in the lieder field – Hyperion’s collection of fifty-five songs by Charles Villiers Stanford already stands next to several volumes of the label’s ongoing Richard Strauss series on the shelves – and that is a useful development for students, archivists and people of a completist disposition. But even if we leave aside the question of whether composers always wanted an entire opus of songs to be performed as a set, and the question of whether they wanted this tidiness regardless of what a singer finds cogenial, this type of programming does no favors for performers. Katarina Karnéus is a mezzo with good musicianship and a magnificent voice. If this program had been pared down to the sort of fifty-five-minute selection it might have been in the LP era, it would be welcomed with unalloyed delight. The program as it stands could hardly be said to expose real weaknesses in the singer, but at nearly seventy minutes it does betray the likelihood that some of the songs, which are not exactly congenial to this particular voice, were learned just for the purpose of the recording.
In the Op. 25 group of Ibsen settings, for example, Karnéus responds beautifully to the harmonic changes in the famous “En svane” and demonstrates fine control of phrase endings in the familiar “Med en vandlilje.” In “Borte!” she really catches a moment of suspended time. On the other hand, she oversings “Spillemænd,” in which her partner, Julius Drake, is dreadfully piano-bound, and in “En fuglevise” the duo tends to break the song into paragraphs. Karnéus has an ample instrument that is comfortable in big, Straussian effusions such as the last song of the Op. 5 Hjertets Melodier and the last song of the Op. 48 German settings (although others have found more ecstasy in the latter than she does). Her Op. 48 also offers a very fine interpretation of “Zur Rosenzeit,” in which Karnéus shows that she understands how Grieg composed not an expression of grief but a stylized memory of what grief was like. On the other hand, she is matronly in “Die verschwiegene Nachtigall” and sounds inappropriately concerned in “Lauf der Welt,” in which Drake is a little picky. In “Dereinst, Gedanke mein,” Grieg marks the words “ohne pein” (without pain) with special expression each time; for Karnéus they pass by in a direct, presentational way. A few of Grieg’s folksier inventions, such as “To brune Øjne,” can’t bear the weight, vocal or interpretive, that Karnéus gives them.
That old Kirsten Flagstad favorite, the eight-song Haugtussa cycle, clearly was meant to be performed complete. Karnéus is so good in the big moments – the fourth song, which shows that her voice is gloriously knit together, and the finale, where she builds a grand scene – that we get the impression that she would be more comfortable with the alternate orchestral setting. For the third song, a little vignette about flirting and blueberry picking, she is a little too knowing, almost predatory. But the fifth, “Elsk,” is her most successful excursion to the lighter side. Yet in a cycle we need a bit more.
In 1992, another Swedish mezzo who rose to Wagner’s Brangäne, Anne Sofie von Otter, recorded her own disc of twenty-five Grieg songs, earning some of the best reviews of her career. Her Haugtussa is a real unit. Von Otter dared to present the penultimate song almost as a throwaway, a transition to the finale. She also realized that the means of address has changed in the last song, the singer becoming an outsider and a narrator. Von Otter is perhaps preferable to Karnéus for home listening (eighteen of the songs overlap), while Karnéus might be more effective in a Carnegie Hall-sized venue. On the other hand, Von Otter is a marvelous musician and would no doubt sing these songs quite differently at Carnegie Hall, while Karnéus is already singing for a big stage. Von Otter’s partnership with Bengt Forsberg also amounts to a great deal more than Karnéus and Drake’s. In Grieg’s most famous song, “Jeg elsker Dig,” Drake lapses into the reticence to which he is prone, while Forsberg acts like a big, taut sail that pulls von Otter’s boat along. In the third Haugtussa song, Von Otter and Forsberg create the illusion that, à la Jane Bathori or Reynaldo Hahn, she is accompanying herself at the piano.
Language is the most elusive of the arts. I don’t speak Norwegian, and I have absolutely no standing to say this, but I’d wager that Karnéus, a Swede, doesn’t speak it either. I’d also wager, on the basis of the Grieg songs in her album Diamonds in the Snow, that Barbara Bonney, an American, does. I’m no doubt off the mark in both cases, but it’s curious that in lieder the perception is perhaps more important than the reality.