BEETHOVEN: Lieder und Volkslieder (Songs and Folksongs) – Barbara Hendricks, soprano/ Love Derwinger, piano/ Christian Bergqvist or Leo Winland, cello – Arte Verum ARV-006, 61:54 [Distr. by Allegro] ****:
Arte Verum is Barbara Hendricks’s own proprietary label, launched in 2006 with a group of Spanish songs. Starting in 1983, Hendricks recorded more than 50 albums for EMI but left that label to found her own because she wanted more artistic control of her recordings after the fact. Undoubtedly, as with many musicians and musical organizations today, Hendricks realized that the old way of doing business in the classical music world is changing forever; just consider once-mighty EMI’s recent financial woes.
Hendricks’s pop album on Arte Verum, Barbara Sings the Blues, has already garnered praise, and I wish the singer much success because she has always combined musical intelligence with one of the loveliest voices before the public. Both intelligence and beauty are in evidence on the disc under consideration here. First, there is the matter of programming: this is a nicely varied bill, including not only Beethoven’s familiar settings of Goethe (Op. 75 and 83) and his groundbreaking An die ferne Geliebte but also a number of folksongs, such as the two from the British Isles, “Sally in Our Alley” and “O Might I but My Patrick Love!”
The song cycle An die ferne Geliebte is much more often the province of male singers, but Hendricks shows that the lighter, tenderer, more vulnerable approach the soprano voice can bring to the music is not out of place. I’ll return more often to male singers in this cycle, though Hendricks’s performance is worth knowing too.
Then there are slightly more obscure works, like the aptly named In questa tomba oscura to a poem by Giuseppe Caprani, to which Hendricks brings an unaccustomed but appropriately dusky timbre. Actually, this song has an interesting back story: in 1808, many of Europe’s most celebrated composers were tasked with setting Caprani’s poem to music. Sixty-three composers responded, but today only Beethoven’s effort is remembered.
The folksongs bring an added dimension in that they’re scored for voice and piano as well as violin and cello. Contributions from Hendricks’s guest musicians are tasteful—fine in every regard.
So to sum up: intelligent programming; finely honed performances; plus a well-balanced, intimate recording make this CD a pleasure to recommend.
–Lee Passarella
