Beethoven / Haydn / Britten – FolksLied (CD, Br-Klassik)

Baritone Christian Gerhaher is currently setting new artistic standards as a lieder interpreter and on the concert podium, and increasingly also on the opera stage. After two choral symphonic recordings (Faust scenes, War Requiem), BR-KLASSIK presents a CD of songs as its third release, which contains a concert recording from Gerhaher’s time as artist in residence with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The conceptual bracket of Gerhaher’s finely tuned program with the ambiguous title folkslied forms the examination of the tension between folk and art song. It includes rarely heard folk song arrangements by Benjamin Britten, the folk song arrangements for piano trio and voice by Beethoven and Haydn, as well as a purely instrumental but also thematically appropriate counterpoint with its echoes of Jewish folk tunes, the E minor piano trio by Dmitrij Shostakovich. The decision to use the German texts of the Haydn songs published in the 1920s is linked to Gerhaher’s homage to Fritz Wunderlich, whose first recording of the German text versions is particularly close to his heart. Instrumental partners are Gerhaher’s longtime piano accompanist Gerold Huber and the solo cellist of the BR Symphony Orchestra Sebastian Klinger, as well as on the violin Anton Barachovsky, the first concertmaster of the symphony orchestra.