Mendelssohn - Lieder / Loewe - Ballads

Our Price: £16.60 (£14.43 ex VAT)

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 2

Genre: Vocal/Choral

Artist(s): Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone), Wolfgang Sawallisch (piano), Gerald Moore (piano)

Release Date: 6th September 2007

Great Recordings of the Century: ‘A distinguished series of beautifully presented reissues.’ (Gramophone)

‘EMI’s Great Recordings of the Century is exactly what it says: these classic interpretations warrant a place in everybody’s collection.’ (The Times)

The EMI Classics flagship mid-price series of reissues Great Recordings of the Century has proved exceptionally successful since its launch in 1998. The series has a high-quality and distinctive through-design, with original LP sleeves and the ART logo reproduced on the front covers and critical endorsements from the Gramophone on the back inlays. The substantial booklets offer newly commissioned and authoritative essays (in English, German & French) and, where appropriate, the sung texts/libretto (with translations).

A crucial element in maintaining the high standards achieved in Great Recordings of the Century is the work of EMI’s renowned team of engineers at Abbey Road Studios. Using the very latest technology, they make new transfers from the original materials (78s and analogue tape) and new remasterings (of both analogue and digital recordings).

The great German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, made these recordings – with Wolfgang Sawallisch at the piano in the Mendelssohn, Gerald Moore in the Loewe – in Berlin in 1970 and 1967 respectively.

This is the first time the LP of Loewe’s Ballads has appeared in its entirety on CD.

As Richard Wigmore notes in his characteristically scholarly and elegant booklet essay, ‘Fischer-Dieskau’s narrative flair, mastery of word-painting and gift for fixing a scene in the mind’s ear made him a natural for the ballads of Carl Loewe, a composer once well described as a 19th-century incarnation of a medieval strolling minstrel’.

The essay begins with a prophetic quote from Gramophone magazine in 1951: ‘There seems no doubt that, if he conserves his resources … Fischer-Dieskau has it in him to become the finest male lieder singer of today’ (review of Fischer-Dieskau’s first-ever release in the UK, a 78 of Schubert’s Erlkönig and Schumann’s Beiden Grenadiere).

In the 40 Mendelssohn songs, Fischer-Dieskau is ‘an eloquent advocate of these rarely aired lieder [in which the composer was] concerned primarily to produce a well-wrought musical structure based on smooth, shapely melody, with picturesque keyboard writing kept to a minimum’.