The second disk in pianist Malcolm Martineau’s project to record all the Brahms songs will soon be available.  It features twenty nine songs for low voice with, as far as i could tell, no theme.  All the works have titles like Fünf Gesänge Op.72 which actually starts the disk.

The singing is shared between mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann.  Both are wonderful singers with terrific artistry and sensitive treatment of text.  With Martineau at the piano it’s hard to imagine these relatively  little performed songs getting better performances.

So what of the songs?  I find them frustrating for the most part.  They are well crafted settings of typical German Romantic poetry for the most part.  No shortage of Nachtigalls.  They range in date from the 1850s to the 1880s but I don’t detect any development or, indeed, anything that hadn’t been done as well by Schubert decades earlier.  That, by and large is the problem I have with Brahms.  YMMV.

There are places where the tone changes a bit.  A couple of the songs in the Vier Gesänge Op.43 set medieval texts and have a slightly rawer feel which made a welcome contrast but there’s a lot of the same.  I could enjoy most of the songs if, say, one of the sets were included in a recital.  Twenty nine mostly similar songs gets a bit tiresome.  So one for the Brahms completist I think.

It’s being released as a physical CD and digitally; MP3, 44.1kHz/16bit and 96kHz/24bit FLAC.  I listened to the standard res digital and it’s clean and clear.  There’s a digital booklet with full texts, notes and bios.  The recording was made in 2022 in St. George’s church, Bristol and in 2023 at Crear, Kilberry which appears to be a wedding venue in Argyll.  I guess if Hugh Moreland could imagine playing Brahms in an Oriental brothel I can imagine it being recorded in a Highland wedding venue.

Catalogue information: Linn Records CKD749

Released date: 23rd August 2024