Franz Schubert - Alban Berg - Robert Schumann - Johannes Brahms - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Johann Sebastian Bach - Hugo Wolf - Kurt Weill - Oswald von Wolkenstein - Fanny Hensel - Wolfgang Rihm - Hanns Eisler - Aribert Reimann - Joseph Haydn - Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy - Walther von der Vogelweide

LICHT! 800 Years of German Lied

Anna Lucia Richter | Ammiel Bushakevitz

Label: Challenge Classics
Format: CD
Barcode: 0608917296525

Catalog number: CC 72965
Releasedate: 06-10-23

- After her Schumann disc (CC 72867), we are glad to present a new disc by great mezzosoprano Anna Lucia Richter.
- The theme of of the disc is: Light. The repertoire encompasses eight hundred years of German Lieder.
- Gramophone on A.L.Richter: [her] bright, clean, focused tone, precise diction and keen sense of drama will be familiar from her performances in an impressively wide-ranging portfolio.

With the present programme we want to explore the history of the German Lied throughout a period spanning some 800 years, from that first light of dawn represented by the earliest music scored with modern notation - courtly love songs by Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1230) and Oswald von Wolkenstein (1377-1445) - down to such present-day emissaries of the Lied tradition as Aribert Reimann and Wolfgang Rihm.
In between we find: J.S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, F.Hensel, Wolf, Berg and Eisler.

The programme is rounded off, however, by the work of a political exile, Kurt Weill: namely, Berlin im Licht. This work appears initially to be no more than a love-song to the future of the electric light bulb: “Turn on the light; so you can see what’s wrong and what is right”. The deeper meaning was soon thrown into relief by the blotting out, within a few years of its composition, of both the light and the right to which Kurt Weill aspired and Germany’s swift descent into the darkness of dictatorship and war. A spark, however, still remained.