Eugene Asti

Sophie Karthäuser, Eugene Asti – Wolf: Kennst du das Land (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:19 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

The brief period between 1888 and 1897, between the great cycles devoted to single poets and the songs on sonnets of Michelangelo, saw Wolf at the zenith of his creativity. That period saw the genesis of the songs later published in anthologies after Mörike, Eichendorff and Goethe. Although even the early songs before 1888 reveal no arbitrariness in the choice of texts, it is this concentration on individual literary figures that characterises the highpoint of Wolf s output. Their names resound in the ears of all who love German Romantic literature and are familiar with its transposition into the world of the lied. While Schubert often mined an unexpected vein of poetry in lesser authors, his distant successor Hugo Wolf drank at the source of these giants. Wolf was undoubtedly a virtuoso in the art of making audible the huge dimension of what remains unsaid, though implied. Perhaps he had only one true peer: his former Viennese fellow student Gustav Mahler. Belgian soprano Sophie Karthäuser studied with Noelle Barker at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She is now in great demand, especially as a Mozart singer. She sang her first Pamina (Die Zauberflöte) under René Jacobs and her first Susanna (Le nozze di Figaro) under William Christie. Since winning the Audience Prize at the Wigmore Hall Song Contest she has developed an acclaimed career as a recitalist, enjoying a particularly close artistic partnership with the distinguished American pianist Eugene Asti.

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Sophie Karthäuser and Eugene Asti – Le Bal des animaux (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:17 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

With the exception of one sole Rossini piece – and even then, the text isn’t very Italian as it’s the Cats’ Duet whose only lyric is “miaow” – this whole programme is dedicated to French works, mostly vocal, with a couple for solo piano. Sophie Karthäuser and Eugene Asti have set off on a wild goose, pig, dromedary, cricket, crow, and fox hunt, keeping an eye out for many other furry, feathered and scaly beasts along the way, with Ravel, Chabrier, Offenbach, Hahn, Bizet, and Poulenc for company – all of whom have written music for creatures great and small, real and fantastical. Alright, on occasion these animals might not be animals, strictly speaking, like Satie’s Statue de bronze (although the statue in question is of a frog), or The Little Shepherd from Children’s Corner by Debussy. Another rarity: there are three melodies from Poulenc’s Bestiaire which have been left out of most recent editions: La Colombe, La Puce and Le Serpent.

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