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Benjamin Appl, Munich Radio Orchestra & Oscar Jockel – Franz Schubert: Lieder with Orchestra (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:52 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BR-Klassik
Time and again, composers – well-known and lesser-known – have arranged Franz Schubert’s piano songs for orchestra. These versions are not in any way intended to cast doubt upon the powerful quality of the originals, they merely place them in a different light, and/or attempt to make them easier to perform on a larger scale – when an art song cannot be performed in an intimate salon or chamber music hall, it can also make an impact in a large concert hall. Baritone Benjamin Appl has compiled nineteen such arrangements from the 19th and 20th centuries for this new CD from BR-KLASSIK. The Münchner Rundfunkorchester, conducted by Oscar Jockel, provides accompaniment that is subtle and in keeping with the work.
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Benjamin Appl & James Baillieu – Forbidden Fruit (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:38 minutes | 1,31 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Temptation, prohibition, good, evil… ‘how relevant are these in today’s world?’ asks Benjamin Appl. With the complicity of pianist James Baillieu, we are taken on a musical arc from simple folk songs through to the great song composers such as Schubert, Schumann and Wolf, along the way visiting the French masters Debussy and Poulenc, exploring ‘new objectivity’ with Weill and Eisler and enjoying compositions by Casucci, Heggie and others. The metaphor of forbidden fruit gives Benjamin and James a wide range of possible interpretations. Whilst some of the song settings centre on sensuality, others focus on socially immoral topics such as incest or sensitive subjects such as abortion. The German baritone embodies each of these stories with a passion and dramatic sense that makes this album a kaleidoscopic and astonishing journey through time and space.
Read moreBenjamin Appl, James Baillieu – Schubert: Winterreise (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]
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Benjamin Appl, James Baillieu – Schubert: Winterreise (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:17 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Franz Schubert’s masterpiece, his song cycle Winterreise (‘Winter Journey’), was written shortly before his death in 1828, at the age of only 31. On his winter journey, the singer wanders as a lost soul in harsh terrain, wracked with conflicting emotions, but consoled by his memories of kinder times – a vivid reminder of the emotional anguish that can touch every generation, whether from personal rejection, or from exile enforced by political, cultural or military pressures.
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![Benjamin Appl, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Guillermo García Calvo - Hans Sommer: Orchestral Songs (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2023/01/05/mtk0gg3wzodja_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Benjamin Appl, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Guillermo García Calvo – Hans Sommer: Orchestral Songs (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:10:11 minutes | 703 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © PentaTone
Newly discovered orchestral songs by an unsung hero. This is an album full of world-premiere recordings of orchestral songs by Hans Sommer, sung by an excellent quartet of soloists – Mojca Erdmann, Anke Vondung, Mauro Peter and Benjamin Appl – together with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under the baton of Guillermo García Calvo. Sommer was a Liszt student whose operas were performed and praised by Richard Strauss, but sunk into relative oblivion due to his unusual career path and independence from major publishers. The songs were discovered recently and can finally be presented to the world. Focusing mostly on Goethe poetry, combining high Romanticism with folk styles, Sommer’s songs are colourfully orchestrated, harmonically audacious, and often highly dramatic and evocative. This album release, commemorating Sommer’s 100-year death anniversary, sheds light on a fascinating chapter in music history, and will hopefully contribute to a renaissance of this hero.
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![Benjamin Appl, Berliner Barock Solisten, Reinhard Goebel - Cantatas of the Bach Family (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/08/30/t73wj3vkr1izb_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Benjamin Appl, Berliner Barock Solisten, Reinhard Goebel – Cantatas of the Bach Family (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:08 minutes | 1,45 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © haenssler CLASSIC
As we reflect on Johann Sebastian Bach and his sons, we are all too likely to overlook the fact that there were six sons from two marriages who inclined towards Music. True, Maria Barbaras third son Johann Gottfried Bernhard, born in Weimar in 1715, more or less disappeared from view in 1737, and it is plain that Anna Magdalenas first son Gottfried Heinrich, born in 1724, was mentally handicapped: A great Genius, which however was never developed, wrote his half-brother Carl Philipp Emanuel in the family chronicle. For thirty years, making and writing music, he had been the musical front-runner in Saxony and Thuringia: the vanguard was located wherever he was, in his hands and at his writing-desk. Increasingly, twenty-year-olds and a few late starters in their thirties were coming on to the market and showing Bach a new way forward: the galant style, spreading north from Naples ever since 1715, and the flamboyant, ever more richly ornamented music of the late Baroque, constantly threatening to break down under the weight of emblematic connotation and religious symbolism, in contrast to that simpler form, written by mortals for mortals, distinguished by its slow, easily comprehensible harmony and its truly singable melodies in what was at most an expanded two-part structure.
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![Benjamin Appl, James Baillieu - Heimat (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/08/30/0886446347905_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Benjamin Appl, James Baillieu – Heimat (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:51 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical
Benjamin Appl won Gramophone “Young Artist of the Year 2016”. He is a former chorister of the famous Regensburger Domspatzen, Appl is now one of the most interesting artists of the new generation, with a great voice, charming personality and great stage presence.
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Benjamin Appl – Bach (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:41 minutes | 1,28 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical
German baritone Benjamin Appl is Gramophone ‘Young Artist of the Year 2016’ and one of the stars of the European ‘Echo Rising Stars’ concert series.
Appl is a former chorister of the famous German choir Regensburger Domspatzen, and now one of the most interesting artists of the new generation, with a great voice, charming personality and great stage presence.
The new album presents wonderful music by Johann Sebastian Bach from famous as well as less known cantatas but also from the St Matthew Passion.
It was recorded with the renowned Ensemble Concerto Köln, one of the leading ensembles for historically-informed performance practice.
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Benjamin Appl, James Baillieu – Schubert: Winterreise (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]
Benjamin Appl, James Baillieu – Schubert: Winterreise (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:17 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Franz Schubert’s masterpiece, his song cycle Winterreise (‘Winter Journey’), was written shortly before his death in 1828, at the age of only 31. On his winter journey, the singer wanders as a lost soul in harsh terrain, wracked with conflicting emotions, but consoled by his memories of kinder times – a vivid reminder of the emotional anguish that can touch every generation, whether from personal rejection, or from exile enforced by political, cultural or military pressures.
(more…)
Benjamin Appl, Jenaer Philharmonie & Simon Gaudenz – Wolf: Orchesterlieder & Penthesilea (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:36 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CPO
I am too cowardly to be a proper composer, Hugo Wolf confessed to a Viennese friend when he was barely 28 years old. And the result of his introspection was not so wrong: everything in his life, not only composing, proceeded in explosive spurts. He wandered through the deepest emotional valleys, suddenly flew up into the highest regions, suffered agonies when he couldn’t think of anything to say, shouted his enthusiasm about a successful piece to the whole world and still managed to produce a respectable, albeit fragmentary oeuvre, from which the early poem Penthesilea after Heinrich von Kleist’s tragedy of the same name stands out as a symphonic masterpiece. The Austrian baritone Benjamin Appl and the Jena Philharmonic Orchestra, led by its principal conductor Simon Gaudenz, have prefaced this highly dramatic monolith with twelve selected songs, most of which were orchestrated by their author himself: a dozen small, finely polished gems based on texts by Goethe, Mörike and Heyse, whose subtle arrangements leave no doubt that Hugo Wolf would certainly have had the makings of a “proper composer”. Whether then, of course, the ingenious things would have been created that posterity owes to him – that is another matter.
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