Äneas Humm and Renata Rohlfing’s new album Sehnsucht features songs from four composers whose careers were derailed by Nazi persecution of the Jews.  Three of them; Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Eric Zeisl were Viennese composers who left for the United States though none of them managed to make the kind of success (financially at least) that Korngold and Weill achieved, though Schoenberg’s reputation was sufficiently established that he survived the transition pretty much intact.  The fourth composer is Henriette Bosmans who was half Jewish and survived the war in Amsterdam though unable to perform after 1942.  The songs by the Germans are settings of German texts.  Bosmans’ songs are in French.

The two Schoenberg songs; Dank and Abschied, are from his Opus 1. so way before he started to experiment with anything other than a bit of late romantic chromaticism.  They are well crafted though with quite a lot of musical interest and, for my money, are the best of the German songs on the record.  The seven Zemlinsky songs are all quite pleasant and somewhat varied in mood but really quite slight.  Zeisl I just couldn’t get into.  There are seven songs here and my reaction to most of them was “meh”.  A couple though; Der Weise and Ein ganzes leben were a bit more interesting.  The Bosman songs, setting four rather dark texts by Paul Fort, sound much the most modern (written in 1949) and have quite a lot of variation of musical style.  They are probably the most interesting songs on the disk.

Humm is a very competent young Swiss baritone (he’s only thirty) and he sings these songs really well.  I would give him credit for not recording the “usual stuff”.  Rohlfing is just fine as an accompanist too.  The recording is OK.  It’s quite natural sounding but not out of the ordinary.  It’s available as a physical CD, lossless 44.1kHz/16 bit and MP3.  There’s a booklet with decent notes plus the texts but no translations.

Catalogue information: Rondeau ROP6276