New CDs with art songs: The song is alive

From the concern one can read again and again that the song recital is a concert offer from yesterday.

Schubertiaden in Schwarzenberg and Hohenems, concerts by the Hugo Wolf Academy in Stuttgart or at the Heidelberg Spring Festival have become places of retreat.

It is all the more gratifying that many (young) singers are anxious to secure a second artistic existence on the pure sound stage - a necessity, especially in the crisis years of the pandemic.

More than three dozen recordings have been nominated for the German Record Critics' Award in recent months: with melodies and chansons, canciones and canzones, romances, couplets and songs, often rarities, even curiosities.

have been the "concept album" for a long time, in which the program is determined more by the selection of the lyrics and less by the music of the songs.

It is a steep rapture of soprano Anna Prohaska, Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and John Lennon's "Eleanor Rigby" with Oswald von Wolkenstein's invocation of the Holy Virgin ("Wer ist, die da durchweißt?") or with a "Douce dame jolie" by Linking Guillaume de Machaut – and linking them together with pop-baroque arrangements improvised by the Folia Baroque Orchestra under Robin Peter Müller during the recording.

The reason for this potpourri with music of the soul and sales ability - "Celebration of Live in Death" (alpha classics) - was the pandemic.

Musically more serious and dramaturgically stringent is the collection of 26 "Odes to Death" published by Olivia Vermeulen, accompanied by Jan Philip Schulze, under the title "Hello Darkness" (Challenge Classics).

With her exquisitely changing voice, she gives a wide variety of lamentations, songs and manifestations of melancholy a linguistically subtly formed and musically sublimely illuminated form - a clever example of the history of mentality.

The deserved recognition: the German record critics' annual prize.

Are there still unknown masterpieces?

The pianist Daniel Heide is convinced that he has found them: late songs from Franz Liszt's widely scattered estate - including "Gebet", "Des lauten TagesStimmen mutter" and "We thought of the dead".

He recorded nineteen of the 85 songs with Konstantin Krimmel (avi music) under the title “You are from heaven”.

Five songs based on texts by Goethe and seven based on those by Heine are performed as cycles.

The twenty-nine-year-old baritone has a flexible, lyrical voice with fine colors in the tenorally colored high register and rich reserves for expansive sound increases - be it in the Goethe song "Es war ein König von Thule" or in the Heine song "Im Rhein, in the beautiful stream".

Heine's bitter irony, which can often only be guessed at in Schumann's songs,