Various - Great Choral Works - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Here are two works composed by Schubert at the very end of his short life. Schwanengesang (Swansong) was written in Vienna in the autumn of 1828. He died on 19 November at the age of thirty-one, and Die Taubenpost (Pigeon post), which closes the collection, is said to be his very last composition. The fourteen songs, by turns light-hearted, somber and melancholy, are settings of poems by Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gabriel Seidl. In the summer of the same year he composed his String Quintet in C major, scored for two cellos, which was not premiered until 1850, at the Vienna Musikverein. The power and orchestral dimensions of the work make it a pinnacle of nineteenth-century chamber music. We could not have dreamt of a finer line-up of musicians to record these two Schubert monuments. Fanny Mendelssohn's Schwanenlied (also to words by Heinrich Heine) completes the programme, along with Felix Mendelssohn's Song Without Words no.1 for solo piano, composed a year after Schubert's death and Schubert's own setting of an unrelated Schwanengesang (D 744, on a poem by Johann Senn).

Though the original vinyl was released was on a single LP and the sound quality suffered as a result, Mama Said is now for the first time being released with better fidelity as a 2 x LP on 180 gram vinyl! Featuring the singles InchIt Ain't Over 'Til It's OverInch and InchAlways On the RunInch, this record was a top 40 U.S. album, top 10 worldwide, and went 2x Platinum in the U.S.

The present album features vocal chamber music as well as sacred music for solo voices by Giacomo Meyerbeer. Born near Berlin in the year of Mozart's death into a family with cultured interests, Meyerbeer was a pupil of Abt Vogler and near contemporary of his fellow pupil Weber. He made his career in Paris, where he became the most important composer of French grand opera. But he still retained wide cosmopolitan connections, in particular serving as Generalmusikdirektor from 1842 under King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, in whose service he continued after a resignation from his original position in 1848. Meyerbeer was a man of independent means, which enabled him to exercise considerable care over the composition of operas and the choice of appropriate singers, and some control over the press. Although most remembered for opera, this album proves that his vocal compositions deserve equal esteem.