MUSICAL OPINION:
Here is yet another Divine Art CD in which exceptional performances, enhanced by excellent recordings, offer an unexpected extra excitement to give a unique bonus to the collector.

I would have strongly recommended this disc after revelling in Stephan Loges’ wholly enjoyable and beautifully presented account of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, in which Alexander Schmalcz is always providing the perfect keyboard partnership to support the variety of expression and intensity Loges brings to his projection of Heinrich Heine’s poems. For the first bonus of the CD we are given the four Heine songs which Schumann took out of his initial twenty settings to create the Dichterliebe cycle.

The revelation in this programme comes with the six Robert Franz settings, each under two minutes in length but each an individual vocal jewel, exquisitely sung. Franz only wrote songs and these have been ignored until now. Surely quality singers, led by Stephan Loges, will soon bring them out of obscurity. Eight settings by Brahms, including a warmly evocative performance of the five in opus 49, complete this major new Divine Art CD.
Denby Richards

INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW:
Performing Schumann’s Dichterliebe is a task “not to be undertaken unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly” – particularly by baritones – “but reverently, discreetly, advisedly and soberly”. Not that there have been too many inebriated recordings, at least to my knowledge. Nevertheless, those last four adverbs are not inappropriate to Stephan Loges here: this is, as you would expect from this most thoughtful baritone, a consistent, thought-through interpretation: often quite slow, buttressed throughout by an individual but not unattractive quick vibrato that somehow reinforces the intensity and seriousness of approach throughout: not just in Dichterliebe but the entire recital. The grief of ‘Hör ich das Liedchen klingen’ is almost tragic, the tears of ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’ are painful and bitter. But ‘Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen’ needs a touch more spring in its step and ‘Ich grolle nicht’ is also a bit careful: it is typical of this interpretation that Loges eschews the optional high note Schumann writes here.

Another baritone, Thomas Hampson, who, like Loges, also includes the four Heine songs Schumann omitted from the cycle on publication, achieves a wider range of effects. But maybe this is all intentional, and Loges wants us above all to hear the darkness in the cycle: Dichterliebe is great enough to sustain many different colourings.

Underlining the ambivalence of some of the texts (those occasional throwaway endings!), Loges offers us in an admirable stroke of planning alternative versions of six of them, by Schumann’s contemporary Robert Franz; he was much admired in his day, but is now relatively neglected. It is absolutely fascinating, as well as occasionally disconcerting, to hear the familiar words in different but not (rhythmically) hugely dissimilar settings. More Franz, please, from this source.

And then to round out the disc, Loges and his admirable partner Alexander Schmalcz, both beautifully recorded, offer eight songs by Brahms; once again his warm, even tone and unhurried approach serve their darker side particularly well, as in the sorrowful ‘To a violet’ (Op.49 no. 2). Even the familiar ‘Wiegenlied’ (Op.49 no. 4) seems almost sombre. Loges’s pianissimo singing of the second stanza is beautifully sustained.

This stimulating vocal recital is complemented by a wide-ranging and articulate essay by Natasha Loges that embraces all 34 individual songs as well as the wider German Romantic context. There are full texts in German and English (literate translations by Eric Sams and Richard Wigmore).
Piers Burton-Page

AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE:
Loges is yet another of the up-and-coming baritones making a reputation in the area of lieder. This is far from his first recording, but it seems to be the first song recital completely on his own. Unlike most of his fellow baritones Loges has a voice that is deep and rich, with no colors to suggest he is a tenor; rather, he keeps the baritone weight in his upper ranges and mixes in very little head voice. (And he avoids the optional high notes in Dichterliebe.) Loges does not bring a wide range of color to his singing, but the quality is very beautiful, and his is very responsive to his texts through diction and dynamics. Alexander Schmalcz is a very fine accompanist, and the balance between singer and piano is very good.

The program includes Schumann’s famous Dichterliebe and 18 additional songs by Schumann, Franz and Brahms. The Franz selections are all based on Heine poems that are part of Schumann’s cycle, thus pointing out very nicely the difference between Franz’s beautiful, lyrical style and Schumann’s more rhetorical, psychological approach. The Brahms songs include the wonderful ‘Meine Liebe ist Grün’, which is a good match or Loges’ timbre, and all of opus 49 (including the incomparable ‘Wiegenlied’, a song heard too much on music boxes and too little in recital).

AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE (2):
If you expect the optional high notes in Dichterliebe that have become pretty much the standard, you will not hear them here. In “Ich Grolle Nicht” it is entirely legitimate to sing the version where the piano carries the melody on the words at the end of the second strophe (“Herzen frisst, Ich sah, mein Lieb, wie sehr du elend bist”), but I find that it takes away from the drama when the top notes are missing. In a good programming decision, the other four Heine songs that Schumann had thought about but finally decided by 1844 not to include in the cycle are presented as a group after the 16 songs of Dichterliebe.

Stephan Loges songs with sensitivity to the text, though he tends on occasion to over-emote and sound like he us trying just a bit too hard to convey the emotion, as in expressing the wonder of May. Other times, he doesn’t go far enough. “Im Rhein, im Heiligen Strome” suffers from lack of contrast between the first and second strophes. “Aus Alten Märchen” ends with a reference to the bliss of the dream world that vanishes like mist, but his singing does not convey the pathos of the experience.

The listener also has the chance to hear six songs of Robert Franz (1815-92), whose music is largely unknown and seldom performed today. These songs show how another composer sets several of the same Heine poems as Schumann. Melodically, “Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai” starts off almost exactly like Schumann’s setting but fails to capture the irony of the poem with anything close to the effectiveness of Schumann. Loges sings them with fine attention to text, phrasing and dynamics.

The singer’s voice sounds somewhat cloudy, dusky and throaty and seems best suited to the more sombre sound of Brahms. There is nothing wrong with this recording, but there may not be enough so good about it that you will want to rush out and get it. The last time a CD of songs by Franz was reviewed in ARG was November/December 1992, so this is a chance to hear his music sung by a good singer.

The accompaniment of Alexander Schmalcz is fine, especially in the poignant postlude of Schumann’s “Mein Wagen rollet langsam”, and the recorded sound is very good. Informative notes and full texts are included.
R. Moore

MUSICWEB:
I’m afraid I’m going to start with an issue that some readers might consider marginal, that of the transpositions.

Although Heine’s poet is a man and we normally hear Dichterliebe sung by a male singer, Schumann actually wrote the cycle for a dramatic soprano. That being so, the vocal range is a little surprising since it sits in the middle octave for much of the time and, apart from the optional A in "Iche grolle nicht", goes no higher than a G. Assuming that Schumann knew what he was doing, it is evident that he didn’t want "top-notey" singing (the aforesaid A being the one slight concession), but rather to permit the sort of intimate, self-communing delivery a singer can only manage in the "comfortable" part of his/her register. It follows, then, that when transposing it for a baritone, the transposition should be sufficient to carry the music into the baritone’s "comfortable" register. Generally speaking, the "low voice" edition of a song originally written for high voice will be a minor third lower, though there is no hard and fast rule and many singers like to decide for themselves. In the case of Dichterliebe the already not-so-high tessitura tends to tempt baritones (or publishers) to transpose it as little as possible. Loges starts out a tone lower, then at "Ich grolle nicht" he switches to the original key (without attempting the high A); he then continues in the original key until nearly the end, transposing the last two down a tone.

Puzzled, I turned to Gerhaher (RCA) and Maltman (Hyperion), just to mention two of the most recent versions, and found an almost identical situation (and they both manage a splendid high A in "Ich grolle nicht"); Gerhaher’s difference is that he has "Und wüssten’s die Blumen" down a third, Maltman’s that he also has "Im Rhein" in the original key.

Does this actually affect what the man in the street hears? I think it does in two ways. Firstly, it is probable if not certain that Schumann worked out an overall key sequence for the cycle, which thereby gets destroyed, and I had always supposed that, when transposing a song cycle, the hard and fast rule is that all songs are to be transposed equally. You don’t have to have technical knowledge to feel a jolt if the key relationship between two consecutive songs is not the one you usually hear, especially if it is less logical than the one the composer wrote.

Secondly, irrespectively of how easily the baritone manages the tessitura, if he is singing in the same key as the tenor (as all these three do for about half the cycle) he will produce a different kind of singing because he is in the upper range of his voice. He may mix in a touch of head voice and produce a magically luminous sound, but is it the sound Schumann wanted when he wrote these notes for the "comfortable" range of a high voice?

If these matters have come to the fore with regard to the present recording it is because Maltman and Gerhaher are sufficient masters of their upper range for my ear to accept what it heard and concentrate on their interpretations. Quite frankly, Loge’s top F – and he has a lot of them to sing – sounds husky in piano and hoarse in forte, rather a blight on an otherwise warmly resonant voice, and I was bound to wonder why he didn’t stick to a tone-lower transposition all the way through, or even a semitone lower still. As a once and for all example, try the rising phrase which opens Brahms’s "An ein Veilchen". If you think the top note lovely then you can buy the disc without fear, though if you have the opportunity to compare all three baritones in the phrase "Da ist meinen Herzen" from the first Dichterliebe song you will surely have to admit that the other two sound at their ease up there while Loges does not.

That said, Loges is a sensitive interpreter, beautifully recorded with a warm toned piano behind him – all too literally sometimes since I noted just a few too many occasions for a record where the piano lags fractionally after the voice in simple chordal accompaniments. He pays particular attention to the words but sometimes, as in no. 3, this leads him to disrupt the line. Under the circumstances, while recognizing that there is much of beauty here, I can only repeat my recommendation for the other two, Gerhaher more impulsively present, Maltman more magically reflective. And I must say that a rehearing of the classic interpretation by tenor Aksel Schiøtz, whether in the famous 1946 recording with Moore or the slightly-fresher voiced 1942 version, recently discovered (both available from Danacord), revealed an inspired simplicity, an art concealing art and a sheer nobility of utterance which modern interpreters might do well to bear in mind. Schumann left a number of these songs without a tempo indication and a rehearing of Schiøtz and other much-loved tenors of the past also reveals that there is a wider range of options than might be supposed – Dermota’s slow, caressing "Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen", for example.

Maltman’s Dichterliebe is part of Hyperion’s ongoing complete Schumann cycle, which all lovers of lieder should be collecting; Gerhaher also couples some lesser-known Schumann. From Loges we get some later Heine settings by Schumann and then a group of Franz songs, all settings of poems included by Schumann in Dichterliebe. This might actually be the main reason for getting the disc.

I had always fondly imagined that the 54 Lieder by Franz published by Kistler, of which I acquired a copy in a Victorian binding many years ago, represented all this composer’s songs, or at least all that mattered. It proves that neither was the case; I was quite bowled over by "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai", which loses nothing by beginning almost identically with Schumann’s, and equally aroused by the following two. But I have to say that "Ich hab’ im Traume geweinet" tries hard without coming within a thousand leagues of Schumann’s pregnant silences and, while Franz’s "Im Rhein" is possibly easier for both performers and listeners to grasp, the Schumann is ultimately more rewarding. In the end it shows that, the greater the composer, the fewer notes he needs.