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ALPHA398
Release Date: May 2019
Paul Hindemith
Juliane Banse
Martin Helmchen
1920s
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Notes
The German soprano Juliane Banse has sung the Lieder of Brahms, Schubert, Wolf, Ullmann, Strauss, Schumann, Loewe and Berg, earning a reputation for both the quality of her interpretations and the warmth of her timbre. She and her regular partner Martin Helmchen, who has just joined Alpha, have chosen to record Paul Hindemith’s song cycle Das Marienleben, composed in 1923 and revised by the composer in 1948. A bewitching, sometimes disturbing cycle whose texts, taken from the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, retrace the life of the Virgin Mary. Fifteen poems, fifteen episodes tinged with mysticism and lyricism. They proved to be the ideal inspiration for Hindemith, whose compositional style here draws on both the power of Wagner’s operas and the subtle nuances of Debussy.
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Reviews
“… An extremely fine performance, then, and one that rightly reaches its apogee in the final triptych of songs reflecting on Mary’s death. Once you’ve heard Banse and Helchen in the ecstatic final bars of ‘Vom Tode Maria III’, you’ll want, like me, to go back to the beginning and start all over again.”
“This song cycle traces the story of Mary from birth to death. Juliane Banse, despite a slight edge to her voice, gets to grips with every word of Rilke’s poetry.” ****
“A wonderful performance of one of the most important works of the 1920s.”
Album of the Week
“Rilke’s cycle of poems, The Life of Mary, was set by Hindemith in 1922-23. It is one of the most substantial song collections since Schubert’s Winterreise or Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and one of the most significant 20th-century contributions to the genre. On disc it hasn’t exactly been neglected … but new recordings are rare enough for Banse’s disc to be welcome, especially for the crucial contribution of her fine pianist, Helmchen… Banse’s timbre is occasionally more strident than that of Isokoski or Janowitz, but her identification with Rilke’s text is complete and compelling.”
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