KEY POINTS:
Not many people these days can seek refuge in a civilised drawing-room and take part in singing or playing Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes.
A new Harmonia Mundi recording of these enchanting pieces for vocal quartet and piano duo allows us to realise what we are missing.
Marlis Petersen, Stella Doufexis, Werner Gura and Konrad Jarnot could not be bettered. They sing with one unquenchable spirit; the men yearn with a rare lilt to their phrasing in O, die Frauen while the women catch just the right ironic tone for the next piece.
When all four join forces to tell of a greedy bird foiled by the twigs of a fruit tree, we have premonitions of a little Mahlerian morality tale, in words and music. Songs such as this also reveal the pinpoint pianistic precision of Christoph Berner and Camillo Radicke, as well as a perfectly balanced recording.
The three songs of Opus 64, including a powerful setting of Schiller's Der Abend, provide a more reflective interlude before the 15 Neue Liebeslieder take us down lover's lane yet again. This time Brahms seems to have a slightly different agenda as the songs tell of regrets with more than a touch of world-weary cynicism.
Argentinian mezzo Bernarda Fink and American conductor Kent Nagano are just the team for a collection of orchestral songs by Ravel and Berlioz, with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin as the perfect collaborators.
Ravel's Cinq Melodies Populaires Grecques shimmer in their orchestral settings (by the composer and Manuel Rosenthal), with Fink's lustrous vocals doing them earthy justice.
At the other end of the album, we have the languorous exoticism of the composer's Sheherazade, with its visions from the ancient East, not to mention the sexually ambiguous L'Indifferent in which Fink is deliciously knowing.
The singer's Latin temperament makes substantial fare of the album's centrepiece, Berlioz's Nuits d'Ete. Villanelle is springtime incarnate while the intensity of Sur les Lagunes is reinforced through massive waves of sound. Fink and the musicians make the most of the chilling journey of Au Cimitiere in a reading which, quite frankly, has no competitor in the current catalogue.
