This is an album that discerning music lovers will find fascinating. As the third volume published by Orfeo of an anthology of late radio recordings by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, it brings together recordings devoted to five 20th-century composers recorded between 1983 and 1997.
Maurice Ravel opens this amazing publication. The immense German singer sings and recites the ever-so special music of the French composer’s melodies with just the right amount of mannerism and preciousness. On piano, Hartmut Höll is a dream partner whose fingers seem to glide along Ravel’s silky music.
This is followed by a selection of Lieder by Paul Hindemith, setting to music beautiful poems by Hölderlin, Rückert, Claudius and other English authors, with excerpts from the 9 English Songs accompanied on piano by Aribert Reimann, who is also the author of the cantata Unrevealed for baritone and string quartet, written for Fischer-Dieskau, presented in the last part of this box set - the Cherubini Quartet officiates alongside the singer.
Also included in this precious volume are the anthologies of Lieder by Hermann Reutter and Wolfgang Fortner, with the collaboration of several vocal artists surrounding Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose curiosity and encyclopaedic knowledge never ceases to amaze us. Reutter (1900-1985) was a sought-after pianist-accompanist, but also a specialist in Lieder and a composer writing in a neo-classical modernism sometimes compared to Hindemith and Honegger. Heavily involved with the Nazis, his contemporary Wolfgang Fortner became one of the important figures of new music in Darmstadt and trained a whole generation of young German composers in the post-war years. © François Hudry/Qobuz