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See Terms & Conditions for p&p rates. | |  | Christine Brewer
Christine Brewer (soprano) & Roger Vignoles (piano) Opening concert of the 2007/8 Wigmore Hall season
Notes on the encore by Christine:
‘A City Called Heaven’ negro spiritual I grew up in a family of
singers, many of whom sang gospel music. My brothers and I quite
often joined our mother in the church to sing gospel music and
spirituals. This music has always been an important part of my life,
so I try to include spirituals in my programs whenever I can. I find in
the spirituals that no matter what the obstacles are, there is a deep
underlying sense of hope and joy. This is what draws me to such
music and gives me such joy to sing.
‘Ich liebe dich’ Richard Strauss: This is one of the many Strauss
lieder that I have sung for years, and that Roger and I have
performed and recorded. This song also exudes such utter joy that
it's difficult not to just want to burst out in laughter at the end of it.
It has one of the most exuberant postludes of any of Strauss' songs,
and I love it!
‘Mira’ Bob Merrill: I started performing Mira about 20 years ago
when I did little recitals and concerts around St. Louis. This song
spoke to me right away, because it is about a girl who is missing her
hometown where everyone knows her name. I grew up in a town of
500 and now live in a town of about 3,500, so I truly know what it is
like to walk down the street and know most of the townspeople.
There is a comfort in that for me, and I miss it when I am travelling
around the world. I think I sang this song as an encore the very first
time that I sang at the Wigmore Hall. It became one of Bill Lyne's
favourites and he asked me to sing it at his farewell concert. So it
has become a standard for me at the Wigmore, and one that always
makes me think of home and all those folks there as well as my
friends here in London when I sing it! “For all the power and musical intelligence she brings to Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder and Wolf's Mignon songs, the second half signals a complete change of mood in the Britten and John Carter's spiritual- based Cantata. This is singing of rare charm and versatility, at both ends of a vast emotional spectrum.” Sunday Telegraph, 22nd June 2008 “Already in town for jury duty on the Wigmore Hall International Song Competition, [Christine Brewer] gave on Saturday a recital of radiant passion and power … generous sound, long phrases effortlessly controlled, subtle gradations of tone … The music’s emotional volatility was admirably caught. Clamour capsized into sorrow; voice and piano kept questioning and shading each other. Vignoles’s subtle gifts proved vital here … In the four Britten-Auden cabaret songs Brewer was at her unbuttoned best. After cabaret came spirituals, packaged by the American John Carter into a baroque-tinged cantata. Vignoles’s elaborate fingerwork never interfered
with Brewer’s exultant glow.” The Times Concert Review “Recorded at the opening concert of the current Wigmore Hall season, this is very much a recital of two halves. The first finds the American soprano’s glorious, soaring voice in Isolde mode: it is the ideal instrument for Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder, and Brewer is in rapturous form here, making as much of the words as she does of Wagner’s music. It is rare, and wonderful, to hear this kind of voice in Wolf’s dramatic setting of Mignon’s Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, but Brewer’s tone is perhaps too fruity in his other three songs for the waiflike heroine of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. In the second half, she lets her hair down in Britten’s Cabaret songs, and sings the negro spirituals of John Carter’s Cantata with heartrending empathy and simplicity.” Sunday Times, 1st June 2008 *** “American soprano Christine Brewer is blessed with both a huge and beautiful voice, and the intelligence to make good use of it. …a thoroughly enjoyable recital.” BBC Music Magazine, June 2008 **** | | | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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| |  | Mahler & Wagner - Lieder
Dame Felicity Lott (soprano) Quatuor Schumann New transcriptions by Christian Favre, pianist of the Quatuor Schumann: "I love singing with these marvellous musicians and I am so grateful to have had the chance to sing Isolde's Liebestod: I can't imagine that it would have happened otherwise! And I love the Wesendonck Lieder which I hadn't sung since my student days: I think they work very well in Christian Favre's arrangement." “Her performance of the Leibestod is an object lesson in engagement with the text, sensuality and controlled power.” Gramophone Magazine, July 2008 | | | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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| |  | Julia VaradySong of Passion - a documentary
Julia Varady (soprano), Viktoria Postnikova (piano) Documentary directed by Bruno Monsaingeon | | | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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Christa Ludwig (mezzo-soprano) Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer | | | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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| |  | Kirsten Flagstad
Wagner: | Wesendonck-Lieder Arias from Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde |
Kirsten Flagstad, Gerald Moore, Set Svanholm & Elisabeth Höngen Issay Dobrowen, Wilhelm Furtwängler & Georges Sébastian (recorded 1948 & 1951) | | | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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| |  | Transcendent Love
Lisa Gasteen (soprano) West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Simone Young Lisa Gasteen was the winner of the Cardiff Singer of the World competition in 1991. Since then her career has taken her around the world, notably as a singer in the Wagnerian and Straussian repertoire. This superb release is conducted by Simone Young whose recent recordings of Bruckner symphonies have received phenomenal reviews and plaudits. | 
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| |  | Eileen Farrell - Wesendonck-Lieder
Eileen Farrell (soprano) Leopold Stokowski & his Symphony Orchestra & Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf Such anomalies have been known, but it is hard to think of one more glaring than this: that a Wagnerian soprano who might well rank among the finest of her century never sang a Wagnerian role on stage. There was no physical disability. Like many others she was of generous build, but she was quite personable and able-bodied and appeared in other roles, such as the Leonoras of both Il trovatore and La forza del destino, where the dramatic conflict and subsequent catastrophe are scarcely credible without some physical attractiveness being there for all to see in the heroine. A reasonably well-informed listener to this present recital who happened to come upon Eileen Farrell’s voice for the first time might be expected to think along these lines: “I’ve obviously missed something. Let’s see. Born 1920, 30 in 1950, and American. With such a voice she must by then have made her début at the Met. Perhaps with Melchior in his last seasons. Sounds as though she would have been a great Isolde. Covent Garden presumably? And Bayreuth? Did she sing Kundry for Knappertsbusch? The Ring under Furtwängler, or Karajan perhaps?”. The answers, sadly, are all negative. There was no Kundry or Brünnhilde, Bayreuth or Covent Garden. America’s national opera house never heard her in Melchior’s time and when it did it was in Gluck, Weber, Verdi, Ponchielli, Mascagni and Giordano: no Wagner. Various explanations have been offered, including the antipathy of Rudolf Bing, General Manager of the Metropolitan at the time, to both Wagner and Farrell. She herself told an interviewer many years later that she would have liked to sing Isolde but was never asked. The truth is more likely to be, as she states in her autobiography, Can’t Help Singing (Boston, 1999): “I kept getting pushed to do Wagner roles on stage, but I wasn’t interested. Doing Wagner excerpts in concerts was as far down that road as I wanted to go; building a career round Wagner had killed off too many sopranos.” She added that she regarded her voice as “too schmaltzy for Wagner”, and that anyway now that Birgit Nilsson had come along she was “happy to leave Wagner territory to her”. Extract from the booklet note John Steane, 2008 “Eileen Farrell never sang Wagner on stage, but her vocal amplitude and breadth of phrasing suited it, as demonstrated by this set of Wesendonck Songs (with Stokowski) and the final scene of Siegfried (under Leinsdorf).” BBC Music Magazine, August 2008 ***** |
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| |  | Wagner: Overtures, Marches ...
London Symphony Orchestra & Philadelphia Orchestra, Marek Janowski & Wolfgang Sawallisch | | | Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days. |
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RIAS, Cologne and Bamberger Orchestra, Joseph Keilberth | | | Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days. |
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| |  | Wagner & Liszt - Lieder
Konrad Jarnot (baritone) & Alexander Schmalcz (piano) | | | Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days. |
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