I've been down with a bit of a bug lately, which means I've been back listening to Mahler lieder. There's something intoxicating and incredible about the orchestration of the Lied von der Erde and Ruckert Lieder, which I find beguiling. Orchestration is about the only thing I can ever think about in detail when I'm laid low --perhaps the rapid changes of colour match my inability to concentrate on anything more substantial.
My recording of these Mahler song cycles is a classic, with Kathleen Ferrier and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sharing the load on von der Erde, and Ferrier doing her amazing thing on the Ruckert Lieder. Ferrier is always instructive to listen to: every vowel is spot-on, every consonant is there, everything is bang on the beat -- what a tragedy her career was so short! Here are a couple of snippets:
This is probably the most ponderous recording of He was despised, but impossible to top. You feel the emotion in every note, and every consonant feels like another lash of the whip. Any singing student trying to imitate this in an exam would be failed instantly -- proof that while performance perspectives have improved, it is likely that the 'discovery' that Baroque music was really quite fast has become a cover for diminished attention spans.
Ferrier was fortunate to emerge at the time when British music was having a particularly fertile phase: she was the inspiration for roles in operas and symphonic pieces by Benjamin Britten, and music by Edmund Rubbra, Arthur Bliss and Lennox Berkeley. Ferrier's career encompassed opera and oratorio, a versatility seldom matched so well by many singers these days.
Here is the one that really breaks the heart:
Near the end, the trumpets get fired up and start going a bit mad all over the place. This page will tell you why. It's worth following the parallel text on the second hearing.
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