Michaela Kaune has a powerful voice -- a skilled voice, a colorful voice, a beautiful voice, and an often affecting voice -- but also a powerful voice. She has an ideal voice for Strauss' Vier Letzte Lieder, her first solo disc for Berlin Classics, but perhaps a less than ideal voice for Schumann's Lieder di Mignon and Frauenliebe und Leben. In her second Berlin Classics solo disc, Kaune takes on more personal, more vulnerable, more delicate repertoire, and her voice, some would argue, may be too powerful for the music. ...
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Michaela Kaune has a powerful voice -- a skilled voice, a colorful voice, a beautiful voice, and an often affecting voice -- but also a powerful voice. She has an ideal voice for Strauss' Vier Letzte Lieder, her first solo disc for Berlin Classics, but perhaps a less than ideal voice for Schumann's Lieder di Mignon and Frauenliebe und Leben. In her second Berlin Classics solo disc, Kaune takes on more personal, more vulnerable, more delicate repertoire, and her voice, some would argue, may be too powerful for the music. Possibly: the heartbreaking songs of a dying waif and the inward songs of a woman's life and love do require more intimacy than Strauss operatic four last songs -- but the key is that they require no less intensity. Although Kaune clearly has a powerful voice, she focuses it here, concentrating it on expressing the heighten emotion of the fusion of words and music and not on sending it out to the last row of the balcony. And the effect is altogether electrifying. Kaune is superb at...
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