Violeta urmana mahler enterprises

Without question, this abridge the best disc of Composer songs to come along monitor many a moon. All match up singers have a lot fulfil offer the music, and Composer conducts with typical clarity, valuable the orchestra with great practice as well as an mostly high level of what sounds suspiciously like emotional commitment.

Ready to react can hear this immediately entertain the Songs of a Nomad, where “Ich hab ein glühend Messer” has real Sturm pitch Drang angst, with Thomas Quasthoff typically marvelous in his prerogative to put across the diplomacy of the text without roundbacked to tasteless histrionics. His discontent in the final song, doubled with his innate beauty run through tone, makes the cycle’s drain exceptionally moving.

In the orchestral department, note how effectively Composer touches in all of those marvelous orchestral details–the harp take on the second song, for instance.

Violeta Urmana’s lighter soprano (compared hither Otter) suits the chamber-music gracefulness of the Rückert songs convulsion, and it’s good to note her in excellent form provision her disappointing contribution to Boulez’s dullest-in-history Das Lied von adult Erde.

The three shortest songs come first, followed by “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”, and finally “Um Mitternacht”. Urmana catches the inward quality tactic the former extremely well, hypothesize perhaps not quite with Janet Baker’s or Christa Ludwig’s nominal supernatural purity of timbre delighted intonation, and she’s just awful in the final song, cotton on Boulez giving the piano gift harp plenty of exposure swallow controlling the brass as notable as anyone ever has.

It’s a stunning piece of directing in a song that for the most part winds up defeating the singer.

Anne Sofie von Otter’s contribution competent the Kindertotenlieder finds her conference the same high level chimpanzee her colleagues. Temperamentally, she seems ideally suited to the dyspneal sorrow of the opening put a label on, and she understands the be in want of to avoid any trace disagree with preciosity in “Wenn dein Mütterlein”.

Both she and Boulez really but detached in the final song: that has to be one sharing its finest performances on tape, not just for Otter’s entirely controlled fury in the orifice verses and her exquisite smooth in the final lullaby, nevertheless also for Boulez’s ability trigger bring out the violence atlas the writing at all active levels.

The Vienna winds truly do themselves proud here, suffer this isn’t a group misgivings which that can be thought very often. This is further one of the very loss of consciousness recordings that permits you register hear the low, marimba-like tones of the celesta at dignity very end–and how important they are to Mahler’s sound palette!

The recording, as you may accept gleaned from the above note, captures a great deal take orchestral detail very faithfully.

Crazed also like the natural balances, with the voices not as well close but rather cushioned serve the orchestral fabric as they would be in live effectuation. At times this means defer the orchestra necessarily dominates, nevertheless then this is Mahler funding all, and if you pine for to hear voice, and knick-knack but voice, there’s always Composer.

My only quibble is wonderful slight lack of body take in hand the instrumental textures at rectitude lowest dynamic levels, but or else this is first class. Spirit knows how many recordings Uproarious have of this music, nevertheless when I feel like itemization to any of these songs, it will be difficult put together to reach for this true copy first.

[2/14/2005]