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WHLive0011 Booklet 14/8/06 2:28 pm Page 2 WHLive0011 Also Available Made & Printed in England NASH ENSEMBLE Beethoven Clarinet Trio in Bb Mendelssohn Octet SIR THOMAS ALLEN baritone WHLive0001 MALCOLM MARTINEAU piano Songs by Beethoven, Wolf, Butterworth Vaughan Williams and Bridge 0002 ARDITTI QUARTET WHLive Nancarrow String Quartet No. 3 Ligeti String Quartet No. 2 DAME FELICITY LOTT soprano Dutilleux String Quartet ‘Ainsi la nuit’ GRAHAM JOHNSON piano 0003 WHLive Fallen Women and Virtuous Wives Songs by Haydn, Strauss, Brahms and Wolf WHLive0004 ACADEMY OF ANCIENT MUSIC Concerti and Concerti Grossi by Handel, JS Bach and Vivaldi PETER SCHREIER tenor WHLive0005 ANDRÁS SCHIFF piano Schubert Songs WHLive0006 NASH ENSEMBLE Schumann Märchenerzählungen Moscheles Fantasy, Variations & Finale DAME MARGARET PRICE soprano Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B minor GEOFFREY PARSONS piano WHLive0007 Songs by Schubert, Mahler and R Strauss JOYCE DIDONATO mezzo-soprano WHLive0008 JULIUS DRAKE piano Songs by Fauré, Hahn and Head KOPELMAN QUARTET Arias by Rossini and Handel Schubert String Quartet in D minor WHLive0009 ‘Death and the Maiden’ YSAŸE QUARTET Tchaikovsky String Quartet in Eb minor Fauré String Quartet in E minor WHLive0010 Stravinsky Concertino Three Pieces for String Quartet Double Canon Debussy String Quartet in G minor Available from all good record shops WHLive0012 and from www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/live WHLive0011 Booklet 14/8/06 2:28 pm Page 3 1 d Soile Isokoski soprano Marita Viitasalo piano Songs by Sibelius, Strauss and Berg s A BBC recording e WHLive0011 Booklet 14/8/06 2:28 pm Page 4 Soile Isokoski soprano Marita Viitasalo piano JEAN SIBELIUS (1865–1957) 6 Songs 01 Våren flyktar hastigt 01.47 02 En slända 04.12 03 Illalle 01.28 04 Vänskapens blomma 02.09 05 Den första kyssen 02.03 06 Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte 03.43 ALBAN BERG (1885–1935) Sieben frühe Lieder 07 Nacht 04.10 08 Schilflied 02.14 09 Die Nachtigall 02.02 10 Traumgekrönt 02.31 11 Im Zimmer 01.12 12 Liebesode 01.50 13 Sommertage 02.15 1 Page 2 WHLive0011 Booklet 14/8/06 2:28 pm Page 5 WHLive0011 RICHARD STRAUSS (1864–1949) 5 Lieder 14 Das Rosenband 03.06 15 Meinem Kinde 02.28 16 Du meines Herzens Krönelein 02.13 17 Morgen 03.57 18 Cäcilie 02.51 Encores GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898–1937) 19 Summertime 03.21 OSKAR MERIKANTO (1868–1924) 20 Ma elän 02.01 Total time: 54.08 Produced by David Papp Recorded by Chris Muir Edited by Tony Faulkner Recorded live at Wigmore Hall, London, 23 June 2006 Director: John Gilhooly Wigmore Hall Live – General Manager: Helen Peate, Marketing Manager: Claire Simons Photographs of Soile Isokoski by Pertti Nisonen Photograph of Marita Viitasalo by Heikki Tuuli Designed by Studio B, The Creative People email: [email protected] Manufactured by Repeat Performance Multimedia, London The BBC word mark and logo are trade marks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence from BBC Worldwide. BBC logo © BBC 1996 2 Page 3 WHLive0011 Booklet 14/8/06 2:28 pm Page 6 JEAN SIBELIUS (1865–1957) 6 Songs Våren flyktar hastigt Op. 13 No. 4 (1891) En slända Op. 17 No. 5 (1904) Illalle Op. 17 No. 6 (1898) Vänskapens blomma Op. 57 No. 7 (1909) Den första kyssen Op. 37 No. 1 (1900) Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte Op. 37 No. 5 (1901) Sibelius’s first language, like that of many Finns of his generation, was Swedish. Although he started learning Finnish when he went to school at the age of eight and although the rhythms of the Kalevala echo unmistakably through much of his instrumental music, as a song composer he was far happier with Swedish poetry than with Finnish. Indeed, he wrote only five songs in Finnish and not far short of ninety in Swedish, many of them settings of poems by a Swede-Finn of an earlier generation, Johan Ludvig Runeberg. It is clear from one of the earliest of the Runeberg settings Våren flyktar hastigt that his verse translated easily into melodic terms for Sibelius – whose characterisation, incidentally, is even more imaginative in the orchestral version he made 24 years later. There is also an orchestral version of En slända, although just about all the interest of the song is in the extraordinarily liberated, largely unaccompanied vocal line. The Finnish words of Illalle, from the same set as En slända, induced a quite different kind of vocal rhythm, and to such thrilling effect that it seems a pity that Sibelius turned to Finnish so rarely – even if it had meant less time to devote to such Swedish verse as Vänskapens blomma, the staunch sentiment of which is so faithfully reflected in the Op. 57 Josephson set. Den första kyssen, on the other hand, is a characteristic Runeberg setting in the melodic line derived so naturally from the first line and the expressive variety secured by its broad contrasts in vocal colour, its emphatic piano entries and its harmonically tortured last line. Developing in style from romans to opera by way of a chilling change of harmony in the third stanza, the other Runeberg song in Op. 37, Flickan 3 kom ifrån sin älsklings möte, is an outstandingly dramatic inspiration. Page 4 WHLive0011 Booklet 14/8/06 2:28 pm Page 7 WHLive0011 ALBAN BERG (1885–1935) Sieben frühe Lieder (1905–8, revised 1928) Nacht Schilflied Die Nachtigall Traumgekrönt Im Zimmer Liebesode Sommertage Berg’s Seven Early Songs we owe, in a sense, to the composer’s wife Helene. It was his love for her that inspired him to write some of them in the early days of their relationship before their marriage in 1911 and it was she who, seventeen years later, persuaded him to extract them from what he had hoped was oblivion and to prepare them for publication. He had plenty to choose from. Before he started his studies with Schoenberg in 1904 he had been unable to write anything but songs and even then he produced little else until he completed his Piano Sonata Op. 1 in 1908. Berg’s extraordinary promise was clear to Schoenberg from the start: “When I saw the compositions he showed me I recognised at once that he was a real talent.” By 1908 when he wrote Nacht, much of the melodic and harmonic beauty of which derives from the whole-tone phrase to which he sets the first line, he had developed well beyond that. Schilflied, which was written at much the same time, is a rather more conventional song, as is Die Nachtigall which was written a year earlier and shows something of the Brahms influence Schoenberg detected in his pupil. If Die Nachtigall is the most immediately attractive of the collection, the Rilke setting, Traumgekrönt, which was written for Helene not long after their first meeting in 1907, is probably the most inspired. Like Nacht, it spontaneously shapes its own construction. The earliest of the seven songs by a year or more, Im Zimmer is so short that it needs little motivic organisation to hold it together. Liebesode – written, apparently, before Berg met Helene – is a particularly sensual 4 Page 5 WHLive0011 Booklet 14/8/06 2:28 pm Page 8 inspiration, closely worked thematically but erotically evocative at the same time. The last and latest of the songs, Sommertage, is also the most prophetic of the mature Berg. For all its passion, it is also rigorously unified by means of variants of the rising phrase that first appears in the left hand of the piano and runs through every section of the song. RICHARD STRAUSS (1864–1949) 5 Lieder Das Rosenband Op. 36 No. 1 (1897) Meinem Kinde Op. 37 No. 3 (1897) Du meines Herzens Krönelein Op. 21 No. 2 (1888) Morgen Op. 27 No. 4 (1894) Cäcilie Op. 27 No. 2 (1894) One reason why Richard Strauss was such a prolific song composer was that he was married to a highly accomplished soprano. Most of the eighty or so songs completed between 1887, when he first met Pauline de Ahna, and 1906, when he temporarily abandoned song to concentrate on opera, were written specifically for her. Not surprisingly in the circumstances, many of them are inspired by poetic expressions of domestic bliss of one kind or another – like Das Rosenband, the luxurious sentiment of which must have been as pleasing to Pauline as its voluptuous closing cantilena. The speculatively tender cradle song Meinem Kinde, written in anticipation of the event, was presented to Pauline, with the rest of Op. 37, on the birth of their son Franz. The difference between Du meines Herzens Krönelein, which is surely not a portrait of Pauline, and Morgen, which is one of a group of four songs presented to her on their wedding day six years later, is a measure of the inspiration he found in her. The safe though appropriately modest Schubertian accompaniment of the earlier song contrasts significantly with the daring piano part of Morgen, which carries the melodic interest in its expressively sustained line while the voice reacts to the rapture of the situation in quiet wonder. Cäcilie, another of the wedding- 5 Page 6 WHLive0011 Booklet 14/8/06 2:28 pm Page 9 WHLive0011 present set, is said to have been written in a few hours on the very eve of the ceremony. Its ecstatic vocal line and its sweeping momentum certainly suggest that Hart’s declaration to his wife Cäcilie found an immediate and spontaneous response in the composer. Gerald Larner © 2006 6 Page 7 WHLive0011 Booklet 14/8/06 2:28 pm Page 10 SOILE ISOKOSKI soprano A native of Finland, Soile Isokoski graduated from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and made her concert debut there in 1986.