Johannes Brahms wrote well over 300 lieder, including his arrangements of German folk songs, partsongs and choral lieder. Considering how long he carried a song around in his head before writing and publishing the final version, this is an astonishing amount.

This 2-CD set presents a selection from Brahms’s huge lied repertoire, which not only gives an impression of his importance to music history up to the present day and what a perfect lied composer he was, but also reveals what a cheerful, young-at-heart and humorous person he must have been.

The selection of songs and duets is arranged chronologically (1853-1896) and includes all phases of his life in which the lied played a central role, thus allowing the development of the German-language song in the time after Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann to be clearly traced.

The pianist Jan Schultsz plays on a wonderful original J.B. Streicher fortepiano from 1871, a model on which Brahms also preferred to play. The singers are Rachel Harnisch (soprano), Marina Viotti (mezzo-soprano) and Yannick Debus (baritone) – young singers who have already celebrated successes in concert and in major opera houses.