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Between life and death - Songs and Arias
Franz Schubert - Gustav Mahler - Robert Schumann - Johannes Brahms - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Felix Mendelssohn - Johann Sebastian Bach - Hugo Wolf - Carl Maria von Weber - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Carl Loewe

Between life and death - Songs and Arias

Christoph Prégardien / Michael Gees

Label: Challenge Classics
Format: SACD
Barcode: 0608917232424
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Catalog number: CC 72324
Releasedate: 05-10-09
A selection of compositions ranges over almost two centuries with eleven compositions and many musical forms – the simple song with piano accompaniment, the narrative, expansive ballad, the great opera aria and more – the album keeps to a clear programme in content: in approximately one and three-quarter hours, Prégardien and Gees present 22 approaches to death, which are likewise 22 faces of death – in the exact order of their frequent recitals over the last two years.
  • World famous singer needs hardly introduction
  • Well known from his almost 200 recordings for all the major labels
  • Outstanding selection of songs and arias about a serious theme
The protagonist of the new album by Christoph Prégardien and Michael Gees has not yet arrived on the scene at the start and is awaited with the greatest yearning. “Come sweet death! Come  blessed rest! Come, lead me in peace, for I am weary of the world, ah come!” Thus the opening of the aria from Bach’s Schemelli Liederbuch, which starts the programme “Between Life and Death”. Death not as the end but as the beginning of a better life – perhaps this message, filled with baroque certainty of salvation and unshakeable quietude, sounds as remote for us today as the afterlife itself. Christoph Prégardien frankly admits to admiring the people of Bach’s time somewhat for their trusting relationship to death: “Today death has been pushed out of our life almost completely, outlawed to the hospital ward and old people’s home. And this is the very reason we have compiled our programme: so that people become a little more aware that death is always in our midst. That we can’t ignore it, but have to accept it.”