Patricia Rozario Charles Owen

Richard Strauss Lieder Patricia Rozario Charles Owen Richard Strauss Lieder Patricia Rozario Charles Owen Richard Strauss Lieder RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949) 1 All’ mein Gedanken 1’08 13 Morgen! … 3’46 (Felix Dahn) (John Henry Mackay) 2 Du meines Herzens Krönelein 1’54 14 Traum durch die Dämmerung 2’38 (Felix Dahn) (Otto Julius Bierbaum) 3 Die Nacht 2’56 15 Schlagende Herzen 2’20 (Hermann von Gilm) (Otto Julius Bierbaum) 4 Wiegenlied 4’00 16 Nachtgang 2’47 (Richard Dehmel) (Otto Julius Bierbaum) 5 Blauer Sommer 2’32 17 Das Rosenband 2’56 (Carl Busse) (Friederich Gottlieb Klopstock) 6 Befreit 5’25 18 Für funfzehn Pfennige 2’20 (Richard Dehmel) (Anonymous) 7 Ich trage meine Minne 1’49 19 Hat gesagt – Bleibt’s nicht dabei 2’07 (Karl Henckell) (Anonymous) 8 Ständchen 2’21 20 Freundliche Vision 2’18 (Adolf Friedrich von Schack) (Otto Julius Bierbaum) 9 Allerseelen 2’59 21 Ich schwebe 1’52 (Hermann von Gilm) (Karl Henckell) 10 Ruhe, meine Seele! 3’28 22 Winterliebe 1’40 (Karl Henckell) (Karl Henckell) 11 Cäcilie 1’52 23 Winterweihe 2’46 (Heinrich Hart) (Karl Henckell) 12 Heimliche Aufforderung 2’48 24 Kling! 1’36 (John Henry Mackay) (Karl Henckell) 62’18 Patricia Rozario soprano Charles Owen piano Patricia Rozario, born in Bombay, studied at London’s Guildhall School of Music, winning the Gold Medal and Maggie Teyte Prize. She also studied at the National Opera Studio in London, and won prizes at the Salzburg Mozarteum, S’Hertogenbosch International Singing Competition, Benson and Hedges Competition at Aldeburgh, and International Young Artist Competition at Tunbridge Wells. She developed a career in opera, concert work, recording and broadcasting. Her unique voice and artistry inspired over 15 established composers to write for her, notably Arvo Pärt and the late Sir John Tavener. She has sung under Pritchard, Solti, Ashkenazy, Jurowski, Belohlavek, Gardiner, Pinnock, Ivan Fischer, Hickox and Andrew Davis, has sung opera at Aix-en-Provence, Amsterdam, Lyon, Lille, Bremen, Antwerp, Wexford, ENO, Glyndebourne and Opera North, and performed concerts in Canada, USA, Russia, the Far East, Australia, Europe, and UK. She has appeared frequently at the BBC Proms. In 2010 together with pianist Mark Troop, she started a singing course, Giving Voice Society, to improve western music in India. She is Professor of singing at the Royal College of Music. She was awarded an OBE in 2001, Asian Women’s Award of Achievement in 2002, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, President’s Award in 2013, and FRCM in 2014. Charles Owen is widely recognised as one of the leading British pianists of his generation. He has performed at such venues as the Barbican Centre, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, Lincoln Center and Weill/Carnegie Hall in New York, the Brahms Saal in Vienna’s Musikverein, the Paris Musée d’Orsay, and the Moscow Conservatoire. His chamber music partners include Julian Rachlin, Chloe Hanslip, Adrian Brendel, and Nicholas Daniel and the Takacs, Vertavo, Carducci and Elias Quartets. He also has a highly successful piano duo partnership with Katya Apekisheva. He studied in London at the Menuhin School, the Royal College of Music with Irina Zaritskaya and Imogen Cooper. He has won numerous awards, including the Silver Medal at the Scottish International Piano Competition and the Parkhouse Award. A regular guest at festivals such as Aldeburgh, Bath, Cheltenham, West Cork and Perth, Australia, he has performed with the Philharmonia, Royal Scottish National and London Philharmonic orchestras. His solo recordings include discs of Janácek, Poulenc and Fauré. Together with Natalie Clein, he has recorded the cello sonatas of Brahms, Schubert, Rachmaninov and Chopin for EMI. He is a Professor of piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Richard Strauss Lieder Richard Strauss was just six years old when he wrote his first song. His very last Lied was penned the year before he died. Song, or at least the human voice, was a constant presence in the Bavarian composer’s life. Although his interest in Lied seemingly waned after the popular 1901 premiere of his opera Feuersnot and his soprano wife Pauline’s retirement in 1906, he returned to song sporadically but with great conviction for the rest of his career, not least when he wrote the profound, confessional Four Last Songs in the summer of 1948. The compositions featured here, however, belong to those first chapters of Strauss’s life, before the success of Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier and a host of other theatrical masterpieces tied the composer to the opera house forever. In these songs, we chart the apprenticeship of that acute dramatist, whose every melodic and harmonic gesture was perfectly calibrated to reveal the most within his chosen text. Many of Strauss’s earliest Lieder were written for family soirées and sung by the composer’s aunt, Johanna Pschorr. Indebted to the great compositions of the early Romantic period, these were often strophic songs or ballads. But in 1885, the year he wrote his dazzling Burleske, Strauss achieved a breakthrough with the publication of Acht Gedichte aus Letzte Blätter op.10, marking the first time he had bequeathed an opus number to any of his Lieder. These songs feature poems by the Austrian aristocrat Hermann von Gilm, who had died the year Strauss was born. Among the collection’s eight songs are Die Nacht and Allerseelen. The unhurried accompaniment of Die Nacht, representing the slow creep of night as well as the narrator’s steps through an atmospheric forest, slowly reveals richer harmonies, while an underlying note of peril reaches a quiet peak at the interrupted cadence on the singer’s final word. The Maytime refrain ofAllerseelen tries to maintain former joys. Here, however, a resolute perfect cadence at the end of the vocal line and the ensuing piano postlude show that life has, unfortunately, moved on. Ständchen is the second of six settings Strauss composed in 1885-7 – published as op.17 – of poems by the Munich-born aristocrat and art collector Adolph Friedrich von Schack. This effusive love song, whose wonderfully filigree accompaniment belies Schack’s description of a nigh-motionless brook and breeze, takes a palpable turn for the erotic at the beginning of the final verse, before building to a fevered climax. Felix Dahn was another poet who proved popular with Strauss (and Reger in turn). His Schlichte Weisen provided the text and title for Strauss’s op.21 set of songs. The poems had originally been inspired by an old index of folksongs, which provided opening lines but nothing else; using the volume, Dahn promptly improvised new versions of the poems. Elements of folksong linger in both the spry All’ mein Gedanken and its successor, the flowing Du meines Herzens Krönelein, albeit with a number of surprising (and infinitely Straussian) harmonic tricks and turns. The songs that constitute Strauss’s Vier Lieder op.27 of 1894 plough a much deeper furrow. As the composer matured, so too did his poetic tastes, moving from attractive but ultimately modest mid-19th-century writers to the weightier utterances of his fin-de-siècle peers, including John Henry Mackay. Born in Scotland, Mackay was raised in Germany and settled in Berlin, though his left wing tendencies and homosexuality found him frequently at odds with prevailing Prussian sensibilities. Two of his poems appear in Strauss’s cherished op.27 songs, written shortly before he married the soprano Pauline de Ahna, to whom he gave the set as a wedding present. Mackay’s no less controversial contemporary Karl Friedrich Henckell’s Ruhe, meine Seele opens the group. Following its restful assurances and Strauss’s effusive and ultimately valiant setting of Heinrich Hart’s Cäcilie, both Heimliche Aufforderung and Morgen! seem to fit the marital bill rather neatly. The ‘invitation’, however, is notably ‘secret’ in Heimliche Aufforderung and that sense of confidentiality can also be felt in Morgen!. With this incredible song, Strauss looks forward to a life together amid the same ‘sun-breathing earth’, but the homosexual Mackay might also have been hoping for a ‘wide, blue-waved’ world in which gay people could live together without the kind of persecution experienced in Bismarck’s Germany. Strauss responds sympathetically, with the vocal line entering almost absent-mindedly, as if we have caught the lovers halfway through a conversation. A similarly rapt quality characterises Traum durch die Dämmerung, the first of three settings of Otto Julius Bierbaum, composed and published the year after Strauss and Pauline married. Strauss begins Traum durch die Dämmerung in one key, only to modulate, rather broodingly, at ‘Nun geh’ ich hin zu der schönsten Frau’ (Now I go to the most beautiful woman). Recently wed and with Pauline’s celebrated soprano voice in his head, Strauss was surely thinking about his wife. A more innocent tale of love is told in Schlagende Herzen, with an accompaniment regularly interspersed with the gleeful pit-a-patter of the young boy’s heart. Nachtgang, written in prose and set by Berg and Reger in turn, is a hushed depiction of a couple walking at night. Reminiscences of the magical modulation in Schubert’s Nacht und Träume underline the sacred qualities of the object of the narrator’s affection, while a later key change describes the moment the couple shares a kiss. Though Strauss’s tone poems and operatic plans increasingly dominated his thoughts during the 1890s, he continued to write songs. Both op.31 and op.32 appeared in print in 1896. Blauer Sommer, taken from the former and setting a poem by Carl Hermann Busse (who died in the flu pandemic of 1918), was written to mark the marriage of Strauss’s sister, Johanna.

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