RPS award-­winning soprano Joan Rogers is joined for Wolf’s Italian Songbook by acclaimed baritone Roderick Williams, with Roger Vignoles at the piano. This new recording for Champs Hill Records was made shortly after their recital at Wigmore Hall, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, in April 2012.

“Each of the three brought sensitivity and experience to the poetry at their command, the end result being a performance of much beauty, feeling, and - most welcomely for this repertoire - joy.” - Opera Britannia

Self-­critical of being master of ‘only a small-­scale genre’, Hugo Wolf made carefully structured collections of his songs, each a tiny drama in music. It means that his Songbooks are much more than random collections and, as with The Italian Songbook, they represent his attempt to make something more substantial, to tell a bigger story, to create a kind of ‘compressed opera’.

Wolf, who died in 1903 following a period of insanity brought on by syphilis, described The Italian Songbook -­ his last major work -­ as “the most original and perfect of my compositions”. Wolf sets his Italian texts, in German translation, with extraordinary wit and perception – in ‘Mein Liebster hat zu Tische mich geladen’ (My sweetheart invited me to dinner), the piano accompaniment reflects the very poor meal, right down to the accents representing the chopping of very stale bread. ‘Mein liebster singt’ (My sweetheart is singing outside the house) incorporates the lover’s serenade in the piano part – a musical sound like a Chopin Mazurka.