Mozart's 250th birthday in 2006 brought forth several cycles of his songs for voice and piano, generally regarded as the most obscure segment of his output. Taken together, these recordings have accomplished something of a rehabilitation of the repertoire, initially dismissed because Mozart for the most part did not set texts by the greats of German poetry. The songs come from all the phases of his career, from preadolescence up to the Masonic circles he frequented in the years before his death. There are various ways to ...
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Mozart's 250th birthday in 2006 brought forth several cycles of his songs for voice and piano, generally regarded as the most obscure segment of his output. Taken together, these recordings have accomplished something of a rehabilitation of the repertoire, initially dismissed because Mozart for the most part did not set texts by the greats of German poetry. The songs come from all the phases of his career, from preadolescence up to the Masonic circles he frequented in the years before his death. There are various ways to present them, beginning with the question of whether to have a single singer or divide them between a male and female.They may be presented as essentially personal documents, springing from the everyday circumstances of Mozart's life. Annotator Sylvain Fort (the notes are in French and English) points to this way of listening to the songs. But the real attraction is the pair of young singers, Belgian-English soprano Sophie Karthäuser and German baritone Stephan Loges. The division of...
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