GREAT RECORDINGS phase 18

MENDELSSOHN
40 Lieder
LOWE
9 Ballads

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Wolfgang Sawallisch
Gerald Moore

3 91990 2

Stereo
ADD

Recorded 1967 & 1970
145 minutes (2CD)

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"Fischer-Dieskau’s voice, here in its prime, can draw on an extraordinarily wide palette of colour within the legato of the most timeworn strophic song: every second is quick and live within the subtly sentimental mode he sets up."
(The Gramophone)

The great German baritone made these recordings – with Wolfgang Sawallisch at the piano in the Mendelssohn, Gerald Moore in the Loewe – in Berlin in 1970 and 1967 respectively.

This is the first time the LP of Loewe’s Ballads has appeared in its entirety on CD.

As Richard Wigmore notes in his characteristically scholarly and elegant booklet essay, ‘Fischer-Dieskau’s narrative flair, mastery of word-painting and gift for fixing a scene in the mind’s ear made him a natural for the ballads of Carl Loewe, a composer once well described as a 19th-century incarnation of a medieval strolling minstrel’.

The essay begins with a prophetic quote from Gramophone magazine in 1951: ‘There seems no doubt that, if he conserves his resources … Fischer-Dieskau has it in him to become the finest male lieder singer of today’ (review of Fischer-Dieskau’s first-ever release in the UK, a 78 of Schubert’s Erlkönig and Schumann’s Beiden Grenadiere).

In the 40 Mendelssohn songs, Fischer-Dieskau is ‘an eloquent advocate of these rarely aired lieder [in which the composer was] concerned primarily to produce a well-wrought musical structure based on smooth, shapely melody, with picturesque keyboard writing kept to a minimum’.