Lieder: Cristina Mantese - soprano

Lieder: Cristina Mantese – soprano

Lieder Cristina Mantese - sopranoLieder by Johannes Brahms,
Robert & Clara Schumann

LIVE RECORDING

Cristina Mantese, soprano
Daniel Levypiano

EDEM 3390

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The Schumann Series is available as a 12 CD SET: 

Series: Schumann Series (view all albums in the series)
Recording location: Live recording, Chiesa della Misericordia – Ascona – Switzerland
Booklet Languages: English

A major new series of recordings dedicated to Robert Schumann, a composer that Levy seems to identify with especial conviction.
Daniel Levy’s interpretations emerge with strength and Romanticism, fulfilling the emotional, intellectual and spiritual challenges of Schumann’s music.
Julian Haylock reviewed Levy’s interpretation of Schumann’s celebrated Piano Concerto in BBC Music Magazine as:


“An all-time great recording…lovingly phrased and exultantly voiced”.


…But it is with a composer to whom he has devoted particular attention, Robert Schumann, that Levy seems to identify with especial conviction. If you listen to some of his most recent recordings, you will find Schumann’s personality and his compendious artistic range illuminated with fresh and perhaps unsurpassed vividness. We already know, from his most familiar works, what an intensely human composer Schumann is–at once mercurial and gemütlich, dreamy and epigrammatic. There is rhythmic fluidity in the writing, with its frequently offbeat accents, and a sometimes surprising richness of polyphony that contradicts the supposed verticality of the piano’s natural textures. Yet it’s not often that the musical character is realized with such force and clarity as, for instance, in Levy’s performance of the seventh movement of Kreisleriana, combining sheer rhythmic impetus with unshakable poise, and continuity of pulse with delicacy of paragraphing.

The pianist achieves light and shade even in this hell-for-leather piece; and that restrained ending, by the way, is the kind of thing that Levy turns to eloquent account in his playing of Schumann–the composer’s almost Ivesian way of closing a boisterous piece with a brief slower and lighter conclusion. There are other Schumannesque characteristics, too, that we may not previously have noticed, but that come to the fore in some of the less well-known works Levy has recorded. Listening to the eighth of the Albumblätter, or Album Leaves, Opus 124, I’m almost tempted–if this isn’t too much of an insult–to suggest that Schumann’s exploitation of unevenly truncated phrases and dissociative textures, searchingly rendered by Levy, points forward to some of Schoenberg’s piano music.

Bernard Jacobson


LIEDER – CRISTINA MANTESE – DANIEL LEVY
TRACK LISTING
ROBERT SCHUMANN
LIEDERKREIS op. 39 - Joseph von Eichendor
1. In der Fremde (In a Foreign Land)02:28
2. Intermezzo02:18
3. Waldesgespräch (Wood Dialogue)02:31
4. Die Stille (Silence)01:30
5. Mondnacht (Moonlit Night)04:26
6. Schöne Fremde (Beautiful Foreign Land01:15
7. Auf einer Burg (In a Castle)03.31
8. In der Fremde (In a Foreign Land)01:17
9. Wehmut (Sadness)02:46
10. Zwielicht (Twilight)03:00
11. Im Walde (In the Wood)01:42
12. Im Walde (In the Wood)01:19
JOHANNES BRAHMS
13. Von ewiger Liebe op. 43 n. 1 (Of Eternal Love) - J. Wenzig04:58
14. Die Mainacht op. 43 n. 2 (May Night) - L. Holty03:33
CLARA SCHUMANN
15. Warum wilsst du and're fragen op. 12 n. 11 (Why will you question others) - Friedrich Rückert02:43
16. Liebst du um Schönheit op.12 n. 14 (If you love for Beauty) - F. Rückert02:31
17. Am Strande (On the Shore) R. Burns - W. Gerhard02:52
ROBERT SCHUMANN
18. Widmung op. 25 (Myrten) n. 1 (Dedication) - F. Rückert02:43
19. Du bist wie eine Blume op. 25 (Myrten) n. 24 (You are like a Flower) - Heinrich Heine02:08
20. Die Lotosblume op. 25 (Myrten) n. 7 (The Lotus-ower) - H. Heine02:24
21. Der Nußbaum op. 25 (Myrten) n. 3 (The Walnut Tree) - J. Mosen02:52
Total playing time: 54:47

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