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 an Austrian pianist born in 1928. According to his Wikipedia article,
At the age of six, Demus received his first piano lessons. Five years later, at the age of 11, he entered the Vienna Academy of Music, studying piano and conducting. His debut as a pianist came when he was still a student: at the age of 14…He received the Mozart Medal of the Mozartgemeinde Wien in 1979.
Cool. Top-notch performers. Typical for Brilliant Classics, a company that strives to offer the very best Classical music at one of the most remarkably affordable prices in the world.
By the way, these recordings were made in 1980. So Ameling was 47 years old. Demus was 52.
As for Haydn’s age, after a bit of poking around, here’s what I discovered on the Brilliant Classics web site:
Haydn’s lieder is sadly often relegated to the opening ‘warm-up’ sections of recitals, or, even worse, totally neglected. This is a pity, for as collectors of Brilliant Classics cycle of all his Scottish Songs will know, there is much wit, warm humour and not a little drama to found in these gems. The songs on this CD span 1781 –95, and the first two sets were written for the Viennese socialite Franz Sales von Greiner, who regularly advised Haydn on the choice of texts.
Given the above information, Haydn was anywhere from 49 to about 63 when he composed these songs. That’s a wide age range. Doesn’t help me much.
Just to put these date range in context, Mozart died in 1791. So these songs were written by Haydn a little before to a little after the death of Amadeus Mozart.
So, even though it’s a CD full of songs by the same two performers, a few songs did stand out to me, all for the same reasons:
Track 2 (“Trachten will ich nicht auf Erden”) – amazing high notes
Track 7 (“Geistliches Lied”) – incredibly gentle, yet compelling singing
Track 10 (“Zufriendenheit”) – fantastic piano playing, with a soaring voice that matches Jorg Demus’ skill
Track 13 (“Minna”) – more amazing singing
The reaons are: They’re freakin’ brilliant performers. The compositions were okay. But the performances of them made it work for me.
Here’s what I listened to today: