Tuesday 2 December 2008

208 Carl Loewe - Ballads (1812-16)


















Recording

Title: Balladen und Lieder
Performers: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Jorg Demus
Year: 1969,71,82
Length: 34 minutes

Review

From this very good double album of Lieder by Carl Loewe the guys who made the list selected the Ballads as a highlight. That they are, but there are also other good lieder to get from this recording. Still I'll stick to talking about the Ballads.

There are 8 Ballads here, all of which show a pretty interesting range of emotions, Fischer-Dieskau is also pretty great at giving the different emotional intonations to the songs.

I have always been a bit ambivalent about Lieder, they start off by boring me and as they sink in I start liking them, the same happens with Schubert lieder, they need some familiarity to really get under your skin. It is on occasions like this, however that I wish I knew German to understand what exactly is being sung here. But hey, still pretty good music. Loewe is interesting, not as good as Schubert, but we'll get there.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In his lifetime, his songs were well enough known for some to call him the "Schubert of North Germany", and Hugo Wolf came to admire his work. He is less known today, but a number of his 400 or so songs are still occasionally performed.

Hard to find, but here's a Loewe lied:


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