German baritone Matthias Goerne has never sounded more like his teacher Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau than he does here, with gentle, profoundly calm lines wrapping themselves around the livelier music of the Freiburger Barockorchester under director Gottfried von der Goltz. Some listeners have found Harmonia Mundi's sound engineering too smooth and gauzy when it comes to Goerne's voice, but one would guess that this was intentional: Berlin's Teldex Studio can produce edgy, immediate sounds when called upon to do so. Goerne has ...
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German baritone Matthias Goerne has never sounded more like his teacher Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau than he does here, with gentle, profoundly calm lines wrapping themselves around the livelier music of the Freiburger Barockorchester under director Gottfried von der Goltz. Some listeners have found Harmonia Mundi's sound engineering too smooth and gauzy when it comes to Goerne's voice, but one would guess that this was intentional: Berlin's Teldex Studio can produce edgy, immediate sounds when called upon to do so. Goerne has taken the role of the heavy in these highly poetic cantatas for bass (which, if you were worried, are perfectly in range for a baritone), which draw contrasts in various ways between bleak death and the dancing of the soul above it all, conveyed in several places by the solo oboe d'amore of Katharina Arfken. All the engineers do is follow Goerne's lead, and the result is strangely hypnotic. The equal role of the orchestra is underscored by the presence of two instrumental works, both...
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