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.
Rooms of Elsinore is a new CD of music related to 
It’s still mostly festival season with two events coming up in Toronto.
Wednesday evening’s Shuffle Hour concert at Toronto Summer Music was given by mezzo Alex Hetherington and pianist Vlad Soloviev in Heliconian Hall and carried the curious moniker The Tortured Poets Department. It kicked off with the letter aria from Massenet’s Werther and let’s face it if anyone deserves torturing it’s some combination of Werther himself and Goethe for inventing him (and possibly Massenet for prolonging the life of a character who might otherwise have fallen into obscurity). Whatever, Alex gave a fine, impassioned reading of the aria which set the stage well for what was to follow. 
operaramblings 