Lines of Life is a CD produced out of a deep collaboration between German baritone Benjamin Appl and Hungarian composer György Kurtág.  It’s a mixture of works by Schubert and Kurtág (with one song by Brahms at the end).  It centers on Kurtág’s Hölderlin-Gesänge Op.35a but there are other Kurtág works on the disk too,  Most of these are sung a capella but there are four settings of texts by Ulrike Schuster that have piano accompaniment (Pierre-Laurent Aimard).  The Schubert songs feature James Baillieu on piano except for the last one, and the Brahms, where Kurtág himself accompanies.

I don’t think I need to say much about the Schubert.  Appl is one of the best Lieder singers around and Schubert is very much home turf for him, plus Baillieu is all one could want as well.  The songs are mostly pretty familiar ones and very well done.  I found Litanei auf das Fest Allerseelen particularly moving.

The Kurtág songs are very interesting.  The first three are all sung a capella and are very short with a seriously wide vocal range and different delivery styles which range from something close to Gregorian chant to speech rhythms.  They are really quite striking.

The Hölderlin songs are pretty complex.  The texts form a kind of dialectic between God and Nature but are very varied.  The second song “Friedrich Hölderlin: Im Walde” is actually prose and set as such and the third, “Friedrich Höl;derlin: Gestalt und Geist” is accompanied by trombone (Csaba Bencze) and tuba (Gergely Lukács).  The vocal style once again varies from chant like to very emphatically dramatic with a wide vocal range and some extreme leaps.  The piece finishes with a song based on an enigmatic text by Paul Celan that references Hölderlin; “Paul Celan: Tübingen, Jänner”.  This ends on a very strange sort of strangled vocalism.  It’s a most interesting cycle.

The Schuster settings are short and feature a seriously atonal piano part.  The texts are rather depressing but the overall effect is interesting in a challenging sort of way.  The final Schubert and Brahms songs show Kurtág playing the piano part with great freedom.  He’s clearly a man who has spent a very long life reflecting on Lieder and making his own very distinctive contribution.  The disk also contains an 18 minute conversation (in German) between Appl and Kurtág which is worth a listen (or a read of the supplied translation!).

The recording was made in Budapest earlier this year and is very clear with quite a lot of resonance which I rather liked.  There’s an excellent booklet with a thoughtful essay by Appl and full texts and translations.  It’s being released on February 15th as a physical CD and digitally; likely MP3 and FLAC (CD quality and 48kHz/24 bit) but I haven’t had that confirmed.  I listened to CD quality digital.

Catalogue information: Alpha Classic ALPHA 1145