Franz Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 1

Photo by Sim Canetty Clark

“FIVE STARS: This stupendous disc…” : The Guardian

“Polenzani and Drake create performances that are at once thoughtful, richly atmospheric and never less than compelling”: International Record review

Composer: Franz Liszt
Performers:

Matthew Polenzani (tenor)
Julius Drake (piano)
Recording details: February 2010, All Saints, Durham Road, East Finchley, London, UK
Release date: November 2010
Produced by: Mark Brown
Engineered by: Julian Millard
DISCID: E1105B10

Total duration: 69 minutes 13 seconds

Track Listings

1. Kling leise, mein Lied, S301 First version  [6'19]
2. In Liebeslust, S318 [2'20]
3. Wie singt die Lerche schön, S312 Second version [1'52]
4. Die stille Wasserrose, S321 [4'14]

Lieder aus Schillers Wilhelm Tell, S292 First version
5. No 1 – Der Fischerknabe  Es lächelt der See, er ladet zum Bade  [4'55]
6. No 2 – Der Hirt  Ihr Matten, lebt wohl  [5'55]
7. No 3 – Der Alpenjäger  Es donnern die Höh’n, es zittert der Steg  [3'49]

8. Der Glückliche, S334  Wie glänzt nun die Welt im Abendstrahl  [1'53]
9. Angiolin dal biondo crin, S269 Third version  [5'22]

Tre sonetti di Petrarca, S270 First version
10. No 1 – Pace non trovo [6'50]
11. No 2 – Benedetto sia ‘l giorno  [6'21]
12. No 3 – I’ vidi in terra angelici costumi [6'01]

13. Bist du, S277 Second version  Mild wie ein Lufthauch im Mai  [5'10]
14. Es rauschen die Winde, S294 First version [2'37]
15. Schwebe, schwebe, blaues Auge, S305 Second version  [3'02]
16. Im Rhein, im schönen Strome, S272 First version ossia  [2'33]

From the Hyperion website

‘If a few singers could be found … who would boldly venture to sing songs by the notorious non-composer Franz Liszt, they would probably find a public for them’ (Franz Liszt)

My orphaned songs’, Franz Liszt once called his repertory of art-songs in six languages (German, French, English, Hungarian, Italian, Russian) when he was expressing the hope that singers might take these works under their wings. For well over a century, Liszt’s songs were considered insignificant against the vast bulk of his compositions in larger genres, but we know better than that now… Click here to read more

What the critics say

FIVE STARS
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 12 November 2010

This stupendous disc, issued ahead of the Liszt bicentenary next year, marks the start of Hyperion’s survey of his complete songs, still a grey area for many despite past attempts by major artists such as Brigitte Fassbaender and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to rehabilitate them. Editorially, we are in difficult territory. Liszt rewrote many of them, drastically simplifying them in the process. But in musico-dramatic terms, the originals are often vastly preferable to the revisions, and tenor Matthew Polenzani and pianist Julius Drake opt for the first versions of the Petrarch Sonnets and the Lieder aus

Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell interwoven with shorter pieces, familiar or otherwise. Most of Liszt’s songs are big statements, usually described as virtuoso. But as with so much of his music, their difficulty in performance is to be found in their emotional and expressive extremes. The challenges are more than met here, with Polenzani doing things in songs such as Der Fischerknabe or Pace Non Trovo that you never thought were possible for a human voice, while Drake’s intensity is total and unswerving.

Hugo Shirley, Musicalcriticism.com, 16 November 2010
News Surveys of Liszt’s Songs from Hyperion and Marsyas

• ‘Kling leise, mein Lied’: Adrian Eröd/Charles Spencer (Marsyas MAR-1806-2)
• ‘Was Liebe sei’: Janine Baechle/Charles Spencer (Marsyas MAR-1807-2)
• Complete Songs — 1: Matthew Polenzani/Julius Drake (Hyperion CDA 67782)

The anniversaries are coming thick and fast, and Franz Liszt – a composer who still resists posterity’s attempts to categorize – is set to get the treatment in 2011. These releases are most welcome in addressing one section of his work that remains little known: the songs. It comes as no surprise, perhaps, that Hyperion is in on the act; the British label has donemore to for song lovers than anyone else, while their massive survey of Liszt’s complete piano music (played by Leslie Howard, who co-curates this series with its accompanist, Julius Drake) is due for a box-set reissue early in the New Year.

On this occasion Hyperion face a challenge from the Austrian label Marsyas, whose series is in part a complement to a new edition of the songs to be published in Vienna. With pianist Charles Spencer at the helm, it has the support of several venerable academic institutions, with the added advantage of being issued on SACD. Its roots in such a publishing enterprise, however, make it all the more surprising that the accompanying documentation is so sparse. Liszt’s songs are especially complicated in terms of versions, and while the Hyperion disc is accompanied by an eloquent commentary by Susan Youans, dates of composition and clearly explained version numbers, Marsyas only provide a general blurb on ‘Franz Liszt’ and ‘The Song’, with no dates or explanations. Version numbers can, admittedly, be deduced from the Searle numbers, but anyone wanting information on the dates of composition – as collectors of such complete editions invariably will – has to find it elsewhere.

While the Marsyas issues fail to demonstrate the advantages one would expect from being associated with a learned musicological exercise, they do not escape the associated disadvantages. In this case that translates into a feeling in the actual performances of a dutiful run-through; they show us how the songs go but do little to persuade us of their merits. Adrian Eröd admittedly is lumbered with some of Liszt’s less edifying efforts: there’s little he can do with ‘Le juif errant’, for example, which at over ten minutes long begins to border on parody – composed in 1847, it has echoes of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, with which it shares a central poetic theme. It receives its premiere recording here, we are told, as do the later baritone version of the three Petrarch Sonnets and the Wilhelm Tell Songs, which remove much of the essential passion and ardour of the originals. Throughout, unfortunately, Eröd sounds a little under-rehearsed, often singing flat. He shows a good command of languages, though, called upon to sing in English and Hungarian as well as French, German and Italian.

For the second volume, Spencer is joined by mezzo-soprano Janina Baechle. She is a singer new to me and whose booklet biography is full of the kind of bizarre hyperbole that is hardly ingratiating. Hers is a voice of some richness and beauty, though, and she brings a lovely sense of calm to ‘Über aller Gipfeln is Ruh’, and creates a nice sense of pathos to the final stanza of ‘Verlassen’, even if the voice seems ill-suited to the Schumannesque world ‘Einst wollt’ ich einen Kranz’. Most listeners will prefer the greater sense of drama Fassbaender brings to ‘Die Loreley’, however, and Baechle, like Eröd, does suffer occasional problems with intonation.

If it weren’t for the arrival of the first volume of Hyperion’s Liszt series, then the Marsyas issues would be recommendable for their completeness, if nothing else. It is not explicitly stated whether Hyperion too plan to record unpublished works – if Howard’s set of the piano music is anything to go by, I’m sure they will – but their series is clearly the one to back. Not only is Julius Drake’s playing more imaginative and delicately virtuosic than Spencer’s but, if Matthew Polenzani turns out to be representative, Hyperion’s singers will more effectively force a reappraisal of the dustier corners of Liszt’s song output. Polenzani is at his best in the Petrarch Sonnets and the Tell songs, which are both given in their extravagent (and extravagently demanding) earlier versions. He shows an astonishing technical command and has these songs reliably in his range – a range that extends to a top C-sharp in ‘Pace non trovo’. The timbre of the voice itself, however, occasionally underlines the songs’ lachrymose tendencies, while the sheer security means we miss out on the edge-of-your-seat vocal heroism we get from other singers – Margaret Price with Cyprien Katsaris in the Sonnets, for example. Like Eröd, he can do little to help Liszt at his most sentimental, and in ‘Kling leise, mein Lied’ and ‘Angiolin dal biondo crin’ the results still verge on the saccharine.

It will be interesting to see how this new exposure to Liszt’s songs will affect the inevitable reappraisals of the man and his work that the anniversary year will bring. And while, as Youens argues in her essay for Hyperion’s disc, Liszt clearly provides a link between Schubert and Wolf, composing his piano parts with an orchestral palette, he also undeniably lacks Wolf’s penchant for the aphoristic. As these surveys continue, that lack might start to wear. People will have to make their own minds up, but it looks like Hyperion will provide the best way to do so.

 Patrick Rucker, International Record Review, November 2010

Nowadays singers are more likely to have a handful of Liszt songs in their repertoires than was the case as recently as 20 years ago. Yet these wonderful works, occupying a unique niche in the composer’s prolific Oeuvre and constituting a fascinating and complicated body of work, still cannot be described as familiar territory, Even so basic a question as the actual number of songs is not easily answered. Some are known only in manuscript and, for certain texts, Liszt composed as many’ as four different settings. The foremost authority on the songs, Rene Mueller, sets their number at 87 for voice and piano, with another 16 for voice and orchestra. Mueller aptly characterizes the songs as a compositional laboratory of harmonic and formal experimentation, where ‘Liszt found it possible to convey the very complex soul of the devoted but absent father, impatient lover, often tortured and unhappy but generous man of the world, and finally resigned mystic.’

All the more reason to welcome Hyperion’s ambitious project of a complete recording. The immensely gifted English musician Julius Drake is pianist for the series and, with Leslie Howard, serves as its co-coordinator. For the first instalment, the superb American lyric tenor Matthew Polenzani performs 16 German and Italian songs with Drake, dating from 1840-79. Despite an interesting live Schöne Müillerin (VAl Audio 1238) from the Verbier Festival a few years back, Polenzani’ s recent focus seems to have been opera (Covent Garden, Metropolitan, Paris, Vienna…). He remains, however, an extraordinarily communicative Lieder singer, possessed of an agile and flexible voice of tremendous versatility. In the most intimate of these settings, as well as in the quasi-operatic ones, Polenzani and Drake create performances that are at once thoughtful, richly atmospheric and never less than compelling.

Pride of place belongs to the first versions of two large triptychs, Lieder aus Schillers ‘Wilhelm Tell’ and Tre sonetti di Petrarca. Though both sets post-date the tragic suicide of the great tenor Adolph Nourrit (in 1839, at the age of 37), it’s difficult to escape the impression that Liszt may have had his old friend and collaborator in mind when he composed these formidable works. Containing in embryo all the harmonic imagination and rhetorical devices of Liszt’s long career, they test the mettle of any tenor and pianist courageous enough to attempt them, During the uninterrupted 15 minutes of the Schiller songs, Polenzani portrays a young fisherman, a shepherd and an alpine hunter on the shores of Lake Lucerne with subtle dramatic discernment and consummate mastery of the score’s wide tessitura, Drake supports the vocal line, not to mention providing a rippling lake, Alpine horns and a mountain storm in a fierce, quasi-obbligato accompaniment played magnificently.

The Petrarch sonnets afford even greater opportunity for the unfurling of Polenzani’s interpretative gifts. He depicts the poet’s love for Laura in all the fullness of tenderness and ardour, articulated in the most aristocratic Italian. Among the other treasures here, Liszt’s adoring song for his first-born Blandine, Angiolin dal biondo crin, and settings of Nordmann (Kling leise, mein Lied) and Heine (Im Rhein, im schönen Strome) are especially delightful.

The only analogous recording that comes to mind is the five-disc set from 1987 of 74 Liszt songs by five distinguished singers and Cyril Huvé playing an 1850 Erard piano, sadly long unavailable. Susan Youens contributes the intelligent and informed notes. I was unable to find a prospectus for the series in the programme booklet or on the Hyperion website. Will all versions of all the songs be presented? Whatever the ultimate scope, the auspicious inauguration of this series whets the appetite for more.

Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 19 December 2010

Hidden gems of 2010: the classical CDs and DVDs you may have missed.

Observer classical music critic Fiona Maddocks picks the releases that deserved far greater attention in the past year.

The start of a major cycle of Liszt’s “orphaned” songs – the composer’s own description of a neglected but substantial part of his output, full of characteristic rhapsody and poetry. Tenor Matthew Polenzani launches the series in time for the 2011 Liszt bicentennial. The singers will change, but pianist-curator Julius Drake will be a constant.