Christian Gerhaher

Christian Gerhaher – Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:23 minutes | 966 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Christian Gerhaher’s recording of Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ in a version with piano featuring tenor Piotr Beczala and pianist Gerold Huber. ‘This recording of ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ does not represent a preliminary stage in Mahler’s compositional process but stands alongside it as its equal. The piano version of ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ is more daring and at the same time more intimate, forcing the singers to sing in a different, more subtly nuanced, way than they would with an orchestra, while listeners are obliged to listen more intently and to prolong the abstract sound in their imaginations until it acquires the rhetorical colour that is implied by Mahler’s music.’

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Christian Gerhaher – Schumann: Myrthen (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 49:22 minutes | 844 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Although he’s alone on the cover, baritone Christian Gerhaher has given a lot of space over to soprano Camilla Tilling in his Schumann record. And so the original tones – and therefore the cycle’s structure – are preserved. The voices mingle and their dialogue reminds us that these Lieder were presented to Clara like a wedding bouquet. The sound recording sometimes plunges both voice and piano into a maelstrom of noise. But happily, the performers offer an amorous reading of these poems borrowed from Goethe, or Rückert, or Burns. Both singers savour each consonant and give the poems a resounding, perfect pronunciation, and an unerring sense of diction (take Camilla Tilling’s oh-so-sensual repetition of Kuß in Die Lotosblume, every bit as distracting as Margaret Price’s), and of recital (the successive episodes of Hochländers Abschied take life in the hands of Christian Gerhaher, a virtuoso of nuance). With accompaniment from pianist Gerold Huber, they have created a very fine record that brings to life that marvellous poet of sound, Schumann. – Elsa Siffert

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Christian Gerhaher – Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:13:42 minutes | 690 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

14 years after his first recording, the acclaimed baritone and “most moving singer of the world” (The Telegraph) turns back to Die schöne Müllerin together with long-time collaborator and pianist: Gerold Huber.

Die schöne Müllerin has always been seen as the most important lieder cycle because of its full-length narrative dimension based on a popular and rather simple story: a disillusioned love between a miller’s daughter and a young miller’s apprentice.

With this new recording of Die schöne Müllerin including five poems, not set to music by Schubert, Christian Gerhaher turns Schubert’s famous song cycle with new insights and a new approach.

Christian Gerhaher gives insights of his new interpretation in the booklet he wrote especially for this release.

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Christian Gerhaher – Mozart Arias (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:00 minutes | 1,29 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Baritone Christian Gerhaher has a rare combination of warm, rounded, almost Fischer-Dieskau-esque tone and dramatic sense, and he’s rapidly gaining admirers. An album of Mozart arias would seem just the thing for him, and the straightforward title of this release seems to promise just that. As it happens, things are a little more complicated. You get notes entitled “The Transformations of Eros in Mozart’s Final Operas” (that sounds even more fearsome in German), which seems to mean that the program explores different kinds of Mozartian male romantic leads, from Don Giovanni (both the Don himself and Leporello) to Figaro (the Count also gets his say) to Guglielmo in Così fan tutte to Papageno in Die Zauberflöte. Arias from each opera are grouped, and between them are single arias that perhaps show the way one concept of the Mozart-era lover bled into another. On top of this, the four movements of Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 in C major, K. 425 (“Linz”), are interspersed around the program, not in their original order. These may have been interludes in the live concerts from which these recordings were taken. They were apparently picked by Gerhaher himself, but the first movement of the symphony as the next-to-last track seems to be beginning something and not ending it. The entire concept is murky, but nothing interferes with the sheer attractiveness of Gerhaher’s singing and the way he shifts gears smoothly from the artless Papageno to the licentious Don Giovanni. As a plain old Mozart arias collection, this is just fine.

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Christian Gerhaher – Mahler: Orchestral Songs (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 54:43 minutes | 464 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

“Admirers of Gerhaher’s lieder singing won’t need any encouragement to listen to this disc. They’ll marvel once again at the astonishing range of colour and inflection he applies to every phrase…[there are] are myriad instances when the essence of a song seems perfectly captured” (The Guardian)

“As ever, Gerhaher combines vocal beauty and acute sensitivity to verbal and musical nuance with a certain patrician restraint…The Montreal orchestra (superlative wind solos) match the baritone in their sentient, compassionate playing, while Nagano keeps textures lucid…one of the finest baritone versions of these cycles since Fischer-Dieskau.” (Gramophone)

“As a singer of German art songs, the Munich-based Christian Gerhaher has no rivals today…The Montreal players rise to the occasion under Kent Nagano, but it is Mr. Gerhaher’s uncanny ability to inhabit each word and each phrase fully that makes this a riveting — and unsettling — experience.” (New York Times)

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Christian Gerhaher – Brahms: Die schöne Magelone (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:32:41 minutes | 781 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

„Though recorded periodically and treated as a cultural touchstone in German-speaking countries, Brahms’s Die schöne Magelone still leaves seasoned English-speaking audiences asking, ‘What, exactly, is it?’

What looks like a Lieder cycle is better compared to songs in Shakespeare plays. The Magelone texts in the 1797 Johann Ludwig Tieck novel function as poetic interludes, but even when set to substantial music by the young Brahms (finished in 1869), they still decorate the story rather than telling it. Still, the 15 songs in the collection need some sort of plot context, if only to tell which of the novel’s characters are singing and why. Narration is heard in the German release of this disc – in a tightened version by Martin Walser. But English-speaking listeners must rely on the booklet or on kellydeanhansen.com, which also gives structural analysis of the songs.

The piece requires more effort than usual, though this new Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber recording rewards such a listening commitment. They aren’t just in peak form but create a polar opposite experience to the piece’s 1971 reference recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Sviatoslav Richter (now available on the EMI/Warner Icon Box devoted to Richter). Fischer-Dieskau and Richter project youthful brashness with explosive musical contrasts plus a swaggering portrayal of Peter (the knight who is central to the story and sings most of the songs). They also make you aware that this music is un-codified Brahms. Forms are fluid, with strophic songs suddenly morphing into something else. Musical ideas don’t follow each other as thoughtfully as in later Brahms.

In contrast, Huber looks for ways to make the music more integrated and coherent while also exploring the harmonic content, and he has a warmer recording acoustic than Richter. Fischer-Dieskau’s Peter is a confident conquerer, while Gerhaher’s is a lover, a complex neurotic one in a characterisation moulded from a keen look at what the poetry tells us. Peter’s ‘timid face’ in the fifth song seems to dictate a lot of the softer, more awed-sounding vocal colours that Gerhaher brings to some of the other songs. In fact, his colouring is more precise and apt than I’ve ever heard from him. And that’s saying a lot. However impressive and charismatic Fischer-Dieskau and Richter are (and Richter finds great meaning in the humblest transitional passage), Gerhaher and Huber make the piece something you can take to your heart.

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Christian Gerhaher – Schoeck: Elegie, Op. 36 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:46 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

During his studies with Paul Kuën and Raimund Grumbach, Christian Gerhaher attended the Opera School at the Munich Hochschule für Musik and, together with Gerold Huber, studied lied interpretation with Friedemann Berger. While completing his medical studies Christian Gerhaher perfected his vocal training in master-classes given by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Inge Borkh. Currently Christian Gerhaher himself teaches occasionally at the Munich Academy of Music and Theatre and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Together with his regular piano partner Gerold Huber, he has dedicated himself to the interpretation of Lieder for 30 years now – in concerts and recordings – and has been awarded important prizes for many years. Elegie is his newest release.
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Christian Gerhaher – Heinz Holliger – Lunea (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:42:11 minutes | 955 MBGenre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM New Series

Heinz Holliger’s “dream opera” Lunea which was premiered, to great acclaim, at Opernhaus Zurich, interweaves strands from the life and mind of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch (1802-1850), the Hungarian-born Austrian poet who wrote under the name Nikolaus Lenau. Lenau’s last, fragmentary writings have fired Holliger’s imagination and led to the creation of an intricately inventive work with a marvellously evocative lead role for baritone Christian Gerhaher. Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “Here Gerhaher can display his full sensitivity in dealing with the finest nuances of language and bring to bear his almost unlimited spectrum of tonal-dynamic gradations in the intonation. The poet Lenau speaks most directly from the sounds and notes…”
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