Martineau dishes up the finest survey of Ravel song to date.

From premieres by Carl Vine and Thomas de Hartmann to Catalani’s La Wally and Jakub Józef Orliński’s Polish songs, it's a month of revelation and discovery with these new classical albums.

Complete collection proves Duparc a master of the art song.

An inventive mix of East meets West makes for an appealing debut.

Boesch’s Schumann dominates a decade in search of new directions.

Malcolm Martineau fleshes out the decade that time forgot.

An accomplished, thoughtfully rendered Debussy recital from Lucy Crowe.

For over a century composers have been drawn to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and the enigmatic songs of the waif-like Mignon. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The virtuoso leads a line up including Kate Mulvany and investigations into Wagner's amours and the Mignon obsession.

In songwriting terms, Reger remains a one-hit wonder: his Mariä Wiegenlied, but heaven help anyone seeking the rest of his vast Lieder output. Now Hyperion has come to the rescue,  but even they supply a mere 33 of the nearly 300 songs which Reger left. Repeatedly discernible in this selection dominated by miniatures is the composer’s tendency to resort to restless chromaticism in songs that begin as folk-like, almost drawing-room productions. No wonder recitalists have shied away. Far easier to master a song that stays in the same mood throughout, rather than switching within seconds from Schubertian quasi-naivety to Hugo-Wolf-style anguish. Significantly, Reger preferred minor poets: no Goethe, Schiller or Heine here. Occasionally Reger uses a verse familiar from Strauss: Mackay’s Morgen!, which Reger makes almost indistinguishable from a Wagnerian dusk. But other Reger settings show him in a much better light and they deserve more frequent airings. This reviewer was particularly taken by the martial Zwischen zwei Nächten, the impressionistic Aeolsharfe (like Debussy to German words), and above all the deliberately antiquarian In einem Rosengärtelein. Sophie Bevan has a big timbre which nevertheless encompasses considerable delicacy when needed. Malcolm Martineau is perfectly attuned to Reger’s unrelenting demands. Engineering and…

The great British accompanist aims to score 10 out of 10 travelling through Vivat’s new Decades series. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The big hitters of 19th-century song are well known, but how did they earn their reputations, who were their respected contemporaries, and how did the art form progress over time? It’s always been easy for a competent, or even an inspired composer, to get buried by the sheer overwhelming enthusiasm for a Beethoven or a Brahms, so a chance to examine the development of song from 1810 to 1910, decade by decade, might be expected to throw up a few surprises. And so it proves in the first of an excellently curated series from accompanist Malcolm Martineau and a stellar quintet of leading singers. Taking Schubert’s miracle years – 1815 and 1816 – as its starting point, Martineau chooses 16 of his finest as a peg on which to hang a thoroughgoing and eclectic selection of the greatest Lieder and song that were around at the time. Ranging across Europe, we visit Spain, Italy, Czechoslovakia, German  and France in a song lover’s magical mystery tour. The under-recorded Canadian tenor Michael Schade gets the lion’s share of the disc and the majority of the Schubert. Like Peter Schreier, to whom… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe…