Tahra Les Grands Interpretes TAH 646, 56:47 [Distrib. by Harmonia mundi] ****:
Except for the collaboration on the Songs of a Wayfarer with Carl Schuricht (9 September 1957) from Besancon which appeared on the pirate Archipel label, these broadcast performances by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b. 1925) are new to the CD medium, and they offer us one of the great lied interpreters in music by a passionate song-writer. The two song cycles included here, Songs on the Death of Children (1904) and Songs of a Wayfarer (1880) each has its tragic dimensions, and Fischer-Dieskau’s intelligent ardor and secure technique, when added to Mahler’s haunted orchestrations, makes for an often emotionally devastating experience.
The Rueckert-based Kindertotenlieder (8 June 1955) with Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt (1900-1973) from Hamburg enjoys exquisite sound and resonance, the five songs achieving their impact psychologically through various stages of mourning, from denial to abject resignation. The third song, in which the narrator looks to a familiar corner of the room to behold an empty space where formerly a beloved child stood, quite demolishes one’s heart. The deep cello and harp sonorities of the fourth song, rife with optimistic self-deception, along with the throbbing horns and hopeful flutes, invoke a personal Paradise Lost. The tumults of the final song, with its storms and hints at Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” captures the fiendish aspects of Nature, Mahler’s having imbibed much of Schubert’s darkest sentiments into his own vision. That Schmidt-Isserstedt is to be counted among the strong Mahler conductors becomes manifest from the opening notes of this powerful realization – close, I think, to what Furtwaengler might have delivered had this score been one of his.
The performance of the Wayfarer cycle with Otto Ackermann (9 June 1954) proves less expansive that than with Carl Schuricht, but it testifies to the essential tempos Fischer-Dieskau had absorbed, most likely a result of the collaboration on this cycle with Furtwaengler for EMI. Ackermann (1909-1960), noted for his work in Johann Strauss and Fritz Lehar operettas and as an accompanist to a slew of marvelous solo instrumentalists, takes the first song for its tenuous relationship of Man to Nature, the latter of whom ignores the personal anguish of the narrator. The second song, of course, indicates what Ackermann’s version of Mahler’s First Symphony might have been, and sparkling and emblazoned it already is. And in the midst of this glittering, shining world, happiness denies itself to the persona, bereft of his beloved. “Nun faengt auch mein Glueck wohl an?” Haunted, inspired, forever denied, Fischer-Dieskau’s voice is a sweet cello here.
Now, deepen Fischer-Dieskau’s vocal resonance, intensify and broaden the affects of Mahler’s marvelous orchestral tissue, and you have the Schuricht realization of 1957, the icing on the cake–or rather, the culmination of some essential Mahler performances the collector and the connoisseur of vocal magic will cherish deeply.
–Gary Lemco
