Harmonia mundi is becoming especially adept at coming up with interesting new concept albums, and this one proves it’s worth in fairly short order. First of all, Konstantin Wolff is as fine a bass-baritone as you are likely to hear these days, with a voice of expressive nuance, graded range capabilities, and a honeyed tone with just enough resonance to bring off these French lyrics. Mr. Sam senses all of this and provides suitable partnership to his efforts.
The premise is simple: find enough poetry by the irritable, irascible, writer extraordinaire Victor Hugo, by as many composers as you can drum up worth hearing, and put it on disc. Hugo, who counted himself as an admirer of Beethoven, Verdi, and even as a friend of Liszt, wrote poetry of incredible denseness and storm-like anticipations of the tersest of times to come. In many ways it may just be unset-able, but then again composers like Saint-Saens and Edouard Lalo were long adept at finding the inside track when putting words to music, and they and the others on this CD tame the Hugoian muse with a firm and unyielding hand that surely would have impressed the author himself, no doubt protesting at the same time.
I enjoyed this thoroughly, and you simply can’t go wrong with this unfamiliar music and thickened French texts, sung by a German baritone born to tame all things Gallic. Great sound, too.
— Steve Ritter
