There’s a line from Casablanca, the classic film starring Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, and Ingrid Bergman (among many other legendary actors), that sums up what this CD sounds like to me.

The dialogue is between a young girl named Annina (Joy Page) and Rick Blaine (Bogart):

Annina: What kind of a man is Captain Renault?
Rick: Oh, he’s just like any other man, only more so.

“Only more so” is Haydn Songs III. More songs in German. More brilliant piano work from a talented performer, and more singing from a gifted soprano. Nothing terribly different. Just more.

Here are the performers:

Elly Ameling soprano
Jorg Demus piano

Previously, I learned that Elly Ameling is a Dutch soprano born in 1933. Info about her can be found here. According to that Wiki article,

After her professional début as a concert singer in Rotterdam in 1953, she performed for more than forty years in virtually every major cultural centre in the world. Her frequent appearances with the leading international orchestras and conductors (Bernard Haitink, Rafael Kubelík, Carlo Maria Giulini, Benjamin Britten, Seiji Ozawa, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Kurt Masur, Sir Neville Marriner, Karl Münchinger, André Previn, Edo de Waart among others) established her as one of the greatest singers of our age.

Jorg Demus is Continue reading →