Milhofer Scolastra - Complete Folk Songs - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Orphei Drangar - Swedish Folk Songs [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/01/1991

Now best known for his 'symphonic songs' such as the Hymne an die Nacht, Alphons Diepenbrock won the admiration of his contemporaries Mahler and Strauss for the confident, post-Wagnerian handling of large orchestral forces in support of vocal lines soaked in passion and grief. Unlike them, however, he was chiefly inspired by poetry, and his output is dominated by vocal works, which are particularly fine in atmospheric evocation. Even when writing for the sparer medium of voice and piano, Diepenbrock laid his songs out expansively, underscored with yearning Wagnerian harmonies, and any listener in search of repertoire beyond the songs of Mahler and Strauss is in for a treat. Diepenbrock read widely, and drew on many sources for his songs classical antiquity, religious texts from the Middle Ages, old Dutch poems, German Romantic choruses, modern French poetry and contemporary Dutch writers. The shared theme of these very different styles in his hands was a tendency towards mysticism and spiritual rapture. Little satisfied with mundane reality and the development of society, he found himself peculiarly attracted to poems which exalted the night and her mysteries. In the song output, this attraction is delicately handled in Der Abend and then much more erotically treated in Kann ich in Musen heisse Wünsche tragen, both on album 1. Album 2 is entirely dedicated to French lyrics by the likes of Verlaine and Rimbaud, full of Debussyan nocturne-like character. Album 3 gathers up the songs to Latin, Italian and Dutch lyrics, reaching a powerful climax with Bejaard, composed in 1917, as an expression of Diepenbrock's indignation towards the German invasion of Belgium in August 1914.

Among the Spanish sources from the first third of the seventeenth century, the Cancionero de la Sablonara holds a very special place. It was prepared between 1625 and 1626 for a German noble, Wolfang Wilhelm, who held, among other titles of nobility, those of count palatine and duke of Neoburg and who had visited the court in Madrid between October 1624 and May 1625. This aristocratic music lover showed enthusiasm for the secular vocal music he heard at the court and, at the end of his trip, requested an anthology for his personal pleasure; it was compiled and copied with great care and beautiful calligraphy by Claudio de la Sablonara, main scripter-copyist-of the Royal Chapel. The collection contains seventy-five pieces, including Inchthe best songs that are sung in this court,Inch according to the compiler. This important source, preserved at Munich's Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, features poems in Spanish and Italian metric forms. There are fewer examples of the latter merely eight compositions written in liras [six-verse stanzas] and one sonnet. The Castilian forms, on the other hand, are represented by five romances [ballads] without a refrain, twenty-nine with a refrain, eighteen letrillas [lyrical poems], eleven romances with a lyrical poem at the end, two series of seguidillas, and several decimas [ten-verse stanzas].