Florian Boesch, Malcolm Martineau – Schumann: Dichterliebe & Kerner Lieder (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:03:26 minutes | 2,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Linn Records
Fourteen years ago, the baritone Florian Boesch released a disc devoted to Schumann’s settings of the poet Heinrich Heine. It included the nine songs of the Op 24 Liederkreis, but omitted the best known of all Schumann’s cycles, the 16 songs to Heine texts that make up his Dichterliebe. Partnered as before by the ever meticulous Malcolm Martineau, Boesch has now remedied that omission with a new recording of that pinnacle of the German lied tradition.
It’s a typically considered performance, in which Boesch’s stealthy, velvety tone and unfailing attention to words are used to superb effect. Whether darkening his timbre for the seventh number, Ich Grolle Nicht, or hollowing it out for the funereal lament of the 13th, Ich Hab’ im Traum Geweinet, he finds the perfect sound world to match up the expressive weight of each song.
Just occasionally he overdoes things, whether by choosing a tempo that seems fractionally too slow for the meaning of the music or the text, or by modulating his tone a bit too intensely, so that the song acquires a kind of gothic creepiness. By and large, though, this is as fine a recorded performance of Dichterliebe as any released in recent years.
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