Juliane Banse & Aleksandar Madzar
Release Date: 25 October 2010
Label: ECM New Series
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 028947638483
Description
Eagerly-awaited album by uniquely gifted soprano Juliane Banse, whose previous ECM recordings have been showered with awards and positive reviews. Accompanied by the insightful Serbian pianist Aleksandar Madzar, the German singer performs a wonderful programme of music by Alban Berg and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, powerful and poetic songs spanning a turbulent era.
Alban Berg's early songs, written while he was still under Schoenberg's tutelage, chart the young composer's metamorphosis from writer of late romantic love songs to master of the modern idiom. The Berg selections here comprise 18 songs - the Sieben frühe Lieder, the Jugendlieder and two fascinatingly-contrasting versions of Schließe mir die Augen beide from 1900 and 1925.
Hartmann's cantata Lamento for soprano and piano was made in 1955 out of solo passages from a choral work of 1936/7 dedicated to Berg. A demanding work, it has rarely been recorded. In his note Paul Griffiths writes, "Lamento is a big piece, one that thoroughly engages the two formidable musicians who present it. Banse is the kind of singer Hartmann must have imagined, one who can maintain ease, power and warmth under difficult circumstances, whose singing conveys at once authority and vulnerability and whose musical experience runs from Bach to the present day. Aleksandar Madzar similarly brings out the depth of history and the immediacy of feeling written into this work."
Juliane Banse's account of Kurtág's Kafka Fragmente - a work she sings at the Wigmore Hall on 18 February - won the Edison Award, the Midem Classical Award and the Japanese Modern Music Prize, while both her recital disc with András Schiff (Songs of Debussy and Mozart) and her starring role in Heinz Holliger's opera Schneewittchen both netted Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik Bestenlist awards.
Personnel: Juliane Banse (soprano), Aleksandar Madzar (piano)
Tracklisting
Gidon Kremer, Kremerata Baltica & Vida Mikneviciute
Arvo Part
Thomas Larcher
John Holloway Ensemble
Heinz Holliger & Anton Kernjak
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra & Tonu Kaljuste
Karlheinz Stockhausen Michaels Reise
Andras Schiff
Soloists; Les Traversees Baroques; Meyer
The Gesualdo Six / Owain Park
La Compagnia del Madrigale
Cappella Pratensis, Stratton Bull, Sollazzo Ensemble
Frieder Bernius, Klassische Philharmonie Stuttgart, Barockorchester Stuttgart, Hofkapelle Stuttgart
Collegium Cantorum Choir, Janusz Siadlak
Sing in Solidarity, Brass Band of Columbus, and Chris Westover-Munoz
Le Concert Spirituel; Herve Niquet
