After the huge success of her first album for Alpha, Crazy Girl Crazy (Alpha 293), which received a Grammy Award,
a JUNO Classical Award in Canada, the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, FFFF in Télérama and DIAMANT in
Opéra Magazine and was BBC Music Magazine CD of the Month, Barbara Hannigan is back with her long-time
collaborator, the Dutch pianist and great interpreter of twentieth-century music Reinbert de Leeuw, for a recital
exploring the roots of modern music, with the composers who left their mark on the turn of the twentieth century:
Hugo Wolf (Mignon Lieder), Arnold Schoenberg (Vier Lieder, op.2), Anton Webern (Fünf Lieder nach Gedichten von
R. Dehmel), Alexander Zemlinsky (selected lieder), Alma Mahler (Die stille Nacht etc.) and Alban Berg (Sieben frühe Lieder).

From what has been called the Second Viennese School, an incredible mix of musicians, painters, writers and other
artists frequenting salons and cafés, a completely new musical language was born. Barbara Hannigan is especially
fond of this repertory and has long championed it. Of course, we think of Berg and his unforgettable Lulu: ‘The
artist who sings’, as journalists often like to describe her, embodies this music with her legendary dramatic sense,
making each of these lieder a story in itself, even a mini-opera...

Sound/Video

Paused

1

Schoenberg: Vier Lieder, Op. 2 - Erwartung
2

Schoenberg: Vier Lieder, Op. 2 - Schenk Mir Deinen Goldenen Kamm (Jesus Bettelt)
3

Schoenberg: Vier Lieder, Op. 2 - Erhebung
4

Schoenberg: Vier Lieder, Op. 2 - Waldsonne
5

Webern: Fünf Lieder Nach Gedichten Von Richard Dehmel - Ideale Landschaft
6

Webern: Fünf Lieder Nach Gedichten Von Richard Dehmel - Am Ufer
7

Webern: Fünf Lieder Nach Gedichten Von Richard Dehmel - Himmelfahrt
8

Webern: Fünf Lieder Nach Gedichten Von Richard Dehmel - Nähtliche Scheu
9

Webern: Fünf Lieder Nach Gedichten Von Richard Dehmel - Helle Nacht
10

Berg: Sieben Frühe Lieder - Nacht
11

Berg: Sieben Frühe Lieder - Schilflied
12

Berg: Sieben Frühe Lieder - Die Nachtigall
13

Berg: Sieben Frühe Lieder - Traumgekrönt
14

Berg: Sieben Frühe Lieder - Im Zimmer
15

Berg: Sieben Frühe Lieder - Liebesode
16

Berg: Sieben Frühe Lieder - Sommertage
17

Zemlinsky: Lieder, Op. 2 - Empfängnis
18

Zemlinsky: Lieder, Op. 2 - Frühlingstag
19

Zemlinsky: Lieder, Op. 5 - Tiefe Sehnsucht
20

Zemlinsky: Lieder, Op. 5 - Schlaf Nur Ein
21

Zemlinsky: Lieder, Op. 7 - Da Waren Zwei Kinder
22

Zemlinsky: Lieder, Op. 7 - Entbietung
23

Zemlinsky: Lieder, Op. 7 - Irmelin Rose
24

Mahler (A): Fünf Lieder - Die Stille Stadt
25

Mahler (A): Laue Sommernacht
26

Mahler (A): Ich Wandle Unter Blumen
27

Mahler (A): Vier Lieder - Licht In Der Nacht
28

Wolf: Goethe-Lieder - Mignon 1
29

Wolf: Goethe-Lieder - Mignon 2
30

Wolf: Goethe-Lieder - Mignon 3
31

Wolf: Goethe-Lieder - Kennst Du Das Land

Europadisc Review

Few performers are better placed to guide the listener through the fractured beauties of early-20th-century Viennese art song than Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw. As founder of the Netherlands-based Schoenberg Ensemble, de Leeuw has been in the vanguard of musical modernist performers since the late 1970s, and he and his ensemble made a sensational impression at the 1983 Edinburgh Festival, when the theme was ‘Vienna 1900’. Soprano (and sometime conductor) Barbara Hannigan is one of the brightest stars of a younger generation of performers specialising in 20th- and 21st-century repertoire, who counts Alban Berg’s notorious femme fatale Lulu amongst her signature roles.

Now, following their highly-acclaimed collaboration in the music of Satie (Socrate, on the Winter & Winter label), Hannigan and de Leeuw reunite on disc to explore key works in the early development of ‘Second Viennese School’ song. The repertoire they have chosen focuses on the unravelling of traditional tonality, as expressed through settings of poems loosely centred on the theme of ‘Sehnsucht’ (usually translated as ‘longing’). Here, the longing seems above all to be for a lost age of greater harmonic certainty, while at the same time looking forward with a mixture of angst and hope to the new musical possibilities taking shape on the horizon.

As you’d expect, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern feature prominently, with beautifully committed, engaged and nuanced performances of Schoenberg’s Four Songs, op.2 (1899), Webern’s Five Songs on Poems by Richard Dehmel (1906-08), and Berg’s celebrated Seven Early Songs (1907). De Leeuw’s colourful but supremely sensitive piano playing points up fascinating connections between Schoenberg and Debussy in particular, and both he and the ever-involving Hannigan are thoroughly idiomatic in the expressionistic depths of Webern and the more overtly lyrical outpourings of Berg. This is music in which one feels both performers are completely in their element, with singing and playing of thrilling immediacy.

By including songs by Zemlinsky (from the mid- to late 1890s) and Alma Mahler (1910 and 1915) alongside these three pillars of the Second Viennese School, Hannigan and de Leeuw add not only an expanded context but real substance to their recital. Zemlinsky’s fundamentally tonal musical language seems to be looking back to a Brahmsian tradition, but also tentatively forward as the world stands on the brink of a new century. Certainly you feel the tension in Hannigan’s performance of Entbietung (‘Invitation’), a setting of words by Richard Dehmel – who provided a crucial literary inspiration for all these composers. Alma Mahler (herself a source of inspiration not only for her husband Gustav, but also for Berg and Zemlinsky, among several others) seems to look even further back from her vantage point in the early to mid-1910s, yet even here you feel a sense of foreboding, not least in the eerie harmonies that open her setting of Dehmel’s Die stille Stadt (‘The Silent Town’).

Following the trajectory set by the Zemlinsky and Mahler songs, Hannigan and de Leeuw end their programme at the point where, in their view, it all started: Hugo Wolf’s Mignon settings from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Here, as the 19th century moved toward its close, music and text, melody and accompaniment became inextricably entwined. Texture as much as tonality defined the music of the new century, and song-setting, for all these composers, was an essential part of their musical DNA, as well as laying the formal foundations for the ‘new music’ ahead. By bidding a tender farewell with Wolf’s extraordinarily prescient music, Hannigan and de Leeuw seem to be inviting us to listen again to the whole programme in the light of its discoveries and connections.

And return to it again the listener surely will. There may be more tonally radiant recordings of some of these songs, and others with more clinical, pinpoint accuracy. But there are few that combine such a sense of sheer involvement, at foreground and deep-background levels, with such a complete awareness of, and identification with, the fin-de-siècle mindset. For that reason alone, lovers of 20th-century art song need to hear this disc. They will find it an immensely rewarding and thought-provoking experience: from these musicians, one would expect no less!

Reviews

Hannigan and de Leeuw command this mysterious, disturbingly shaded and sensual music with aptly teasing restraint

The Sunday Times 16 September 2018

Is there nothing that Barbara Hannigan cannot do? Apart from being the world’s best, most persuasive singer of contemporary music, the Canadian soprano has recently become a nifty conductor, almost capable of displaying both skills at once. After her new release it’s also clear that she’s a powerful singer of late romantic lieder, songs about night shadows, clouds, love, death, white chrysanthemums and all the other symbols customarily stacked up inside the stanzas of feverish poets. Geoff Brown

The Times 21 September 2018

Hannigan’s voice wraps itself lovingly around these vocal lines, savouring every chromatic morsel, and sometimes bleaching her tone until it comes close to sprechgesang. ... she conveys the trembling fragility and pastel colours of this music with such perfect tact, and De Leeuw measures the accompaniments so precisely, leaving their unresolved dissonances hanging in space, that a whole expressive world seems perfectly evoked. Andrew Clements

The Guardian 27 September 2018

Hannigan’s luminous voice perfectly suits this music. ... For me, the seven Zemlinksy songs were a revelation. ‘Da waren zwei Kinder’ and the tumultuous ‘Entbietung’ also eleicit a new, weightier sound from Hannigan. ‘Frühlingstag’ is exquistitely, unforgettably beautiful. Natasha Loges

BBC Music Magazine Christams 2018