KEY POINTS:
Werner Gura and Christoph Berner's new Mozart disc is a timely reminder that the art of Lieder was thriving well before Schubert and Schumann came along.
There are no Erlkings lurking in this Mozartian sunshine. Verse by verse, we join trysting nymphs and shepherds and celebrate the blossoming spring. A piquant setting of Goethe's Das Veilchen presents us with a love-besotted violet who is thrilled to be trampled by a beautiful maiden.
Gura is an inspired teller of tales, especially in the Goethe. But then anyone who knows the two men's recent recording of Schumann's Dichterliebe would expect nothing less.
Later songs can be more adventurous (especially the lingering Abendempfindung an Laura) and the shapely An Chloe, with Gura literally gasping with passion, is a song tailormade for the lovelorn Cherubino.
The piano pieces that separate the brackets of songs are lovely, even if a set of early variations might test some listeners' stamina. The D minor Fantasy, with Mozart at his most romantic, sounds exotic on the period Streicher piano as does the acerbic late Gigue, dashed off by Berner with enviable panache.
Soprano Sandrine Piau alternates French and German composers on her new recital, Evocation, accompanied by American Susan Manoff.
Inevitably, the Gallic contingent centres around four early Debussy songs, with Piau at her most tonally fragrant in Fleur du bles, underscored by Manoff's finely-judged pianism.
Five Chausson songs, including a slightly eerie Serenade, will have you searching out more by this underrated composer and Charles Koechlin's Songs pour Gladys are chic, wry observations on amour, written not so long after the composer had penned a set of soignée dances for Ginger Rogers.
Crossing the border, the French soprano does not quite attain the same rosy, teutonic glow from Strauss' Madchenlieder that some would, although six songs by Zemlinsky are miniature worlds of wonderment, with artless visions of spring next to the unsettling seduction of Entfuhrung.
A visit to the heady beauties of early Schoenberg in his four Opus 2 Lieder is the final offering from a partnership that I would like to hear much more of.
* Mozart: Lieder & Klavierstucke (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901979, through Ode Records)
* Sandrine Piau: Evocation (Naive V 5063, through Elite Music)
