GREAT RECORDINGS phase 12

SCHUMANN: LIEDERKREIS
Opp.24 & 39, 13 LIEDER
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Gerald Moore & Hertha Klust

5 62755 2

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'Fischer-Dieskau is the most persuasive champion of Schumann's songs. His great virtues - tones at once marvellously beautiful and apt, wonderful phrasing, and superb utterance of words - are heard here at their very finest.' (Gramophone)

In 1955 and 1957, when these recordings of Liederkreis were first issued on LP, Schumann's reputation as a Lieder composer rested on the song cycles Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -leben and only a handful of other songs.

In fact, Schumann wrote more than 250 Lieder (many of them in a great outpouring of song during 1840, the year of his marriage to Clara Wieck) and it is to the pioneering efforts of the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau that the musical world owes its current awareness of the true breadth and richness of Schumann's Lieder legacy.

In this CD compilation, Fischer-Dieskau sings the famous Op.39 Liederkreis, settings of Eichendorff (who is also represented by the two Op.45 songs), and the less familiar and more modest Op. 24 cycle, settings of Heine, whose poems feature in the remaining songs on the disc. The superb pianists are Hertha Klust, Fischer-Dieskau's accompanist and mentor in the early years of his career, and Gerald Moore, the singer's great collaborator for more than 20 years.