Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw follow their 2016 disc of Satie with another collection of songs from the turn of the 20th century that represent the beginnings of a very different strand of modernism. The earliest settings in their Viennese selection, Hugo Wolf’s four Mignon-Lieder of 1888, provide an unexpected coda, which otherwise ranges chronologically from a selection of Alexander Zemlinsky’s Op 2, 5 and 7, all composed in the 1890s, to a group of Alma Mahler’s songs from 1915.
All three members of the Second Viennese School are represented, too. Schoenberg’s Four Songs Op 2, three to texts by Richard Dehmel, the fourth to a poem by Johannes Schlaf, were already pushing towards the edges of what was regarded as respectable harmony in 1899, while Webern’s five Dehmel settings straddle the beginning of his studies with Schoenberg in 1908, and preceded his official Op 1, the Passacaglia for orchestra. Berg had also written masses of songs, more than 70 of them before beginning his composition studies, but Hannigan and De Leeuw confine themselves to the well-known group that the composer later selected and published as his Seven Early Songs.
Hannigan’s voice wraps itself lovingly around these vocal lines, savouring every chromatic morsel, and sometimes bleaching her tone until it comes close to sprechgesang. Occasionally a bigger, more fulsome soprano sound might be more appropriate, particularly in the less compromised late Romanticism of the Berg songs, but she conveys the trembling fragility and pastel colours of this music with such perfect tact, and De Leeuw measures the accompaniments so precisely, leaving their unresolved dissonances hanging in space, that a whole expressive world seems perfectly evoked.
This week’s other picks
That Viennese world of heightened feeling is not far removed from the language of Wolfgang Rihm’s “nocturnal scene for soprano and orchestra”, Das Gehege, based on a text by Botho Strauss and premiered in 2006 as a prologue to William Friedkin’s staging of Strauss’s Salome, which appears on disc for the first time. Rayanne Dupuis is the swooping, soaring protagonist, with the Deutsche Symphonie-Orchester Berlin coolly conducted by Kent Nagano. It’s a strange, intense piece, a clear descendant of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, with the absent lover of that monodrama replaced by a caged eagle that the woman eventually kills. Pairing it with the anodyne neo-Romanticism of Jean-Pascal Beintus’s score to accompany a narration of Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince seems stranger still.
