This Beethoven release by historical performance specialists Werner Güra (tenor) and Christoph Berner (fortepiano) is novel in several ways and conjures an intimate Romantic-era chamber atmosphere as few other Beethoven song recordings have done. Berner's Streicher fortepiano of 1847 is a marvelous instrument: quiet, but resonant, with a marvelous misty high register in the variation passages of the late Bagatelles, Op. 126. But even better is the concept of the program, which is more or less unprecedented in the recording ...
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This Beethoven release by historical performance specialists Werner Güra (tenor) and Christoph Berner (fortepiano) is novel in several ways and conjures an intimate Romantic-era chamber atmosphere as few other Beethoven song recordings have done. Berner's Streicher fortepiano of 1847 is a marvelous instrument: quiet, but resonant, with a marvelous misty high register in the variation passages of the late Bagatelles, Op. 126. But even better is the concept of the program, which is more or less unprecedented in the recording era, but might well have been quite familiar to an audience in an Austrian household a couple of generations after Beethoven. Güra and Berner offer songs from all the phases of Beethoven's career, from early to on-the-brink-of-late, the latter in the form of the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98 (On the Distant Beloved). This cycle in Güra's highly expressive reading comes across not only as a pioneering song cycle, the first true example of the form, but as an intensely...
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