GREAT RECORDINGS phase 11

WOLF: ITALIENISCHES LIEDERBUCH
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau & Gerald Moore

5 62650 2

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'An outstanding issue which should be widely welcomed and supported by all lovers of Lieder. Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau are in excellent vocal form and it is difficult to know how adequately to praise the piano-playing of Gerald Moore.' (Gramophone)

Appropriately in the year of the centenary of the death of one of the greatest of all Lieder composers, Hugo Wolf (1860-1903), Great Recordings of the Century reissues this classic late 1960s recording of the composer's last song cycle.

The Italian Songbook (1890, 1891 & 1896), a sequence of settings of 46 short folk poems translated into German by the poet and novelist Paul Heyse, is sung here by two of the indisputably great Lieder singers of the 20th century, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Alec Robertson, reviewing the LPs in Gramophone in February 1969, wrote of Gerald Moore: 'He knows these songs inside out and is able to establish the widely ranging moods of each one at once and sustain or change it with all kinds of subtleties we do not find in any other pianist'.