This is a double CD
reissue of two Capriccio discs first
issued over a decade ago. It contains
the orchestrated Wolf songs and the
surviving (piano accompanied) fragment
of the opera Manuel Venegas. The
latter is especially important, and
though its incompleteness is a lamentable
fact, we can nevertheless appreciate
what was written. Fifty or so pages
of vocal score are all that remains
since Wolf then suffered an irreversible
breakdown. This amounts to some half
an hour of music. The plot is of the
Rich Man Returned variety, in which
Manuel returns, newly rich, to find
his loved one married to another. It’s
immediately apparent from the opening
chorus for the villagers, Frühling,
Herrscher in sonnigen Blau that
Wolf’s imagination and command were
quite untouched by his illness. The
lightness and airiness of the chorus
and its distribution of weight are unarguably
confident and assured and also delightfully
sprung. Wolf manages to feed some songs
from the Spanisches Liederbuch into
the operatic fragment as well, and his
Wagnerian inheritance makes itself apparent
throughout. Also apparent is Hartmut
Höll’s superbly supportive and
imaginative pianism, his conveyance
of sonority, mood and weight. Protschka
is at his considerable best in the long
and beautiful passage Stadt meiner
Väter, meiner Knabenzeit –
nicely emphatic but also lyric. Mitsuko
Shirai is assured enough to take
some of her passages rather slowly but
with great character and refinement
of legato.
It’s mezzo Shirai who
bears the weight of the rest of the
disc and a half, the self-orchestrated
Wolf songs. Wolf was never more explicitly
Wagnerian than in these settings and
the lineage can be felt with unsuffocating
aptness throughout (Tristan in An
den Schlaf is perhaps the most obvious
example). The orchestrations tend to
inflate the meaning of the poems and
it’s arguable that they make explicit
what the piano-accompanied versions
suggest through half-light and shade.
Nevertheless there are some first recordings
here and it’s certainly valuable to
hear them, not least in such idiomatic
and commanding performances. Shirai
brings considerable reserves of agility,
tonal nuance and power to the mezzo
part. Hers is a very vibrant sound with
quite an insistent, pressing vibrato
(sample Kennst du das Land to
see if you are sympathetic to it). Alongside
Shirai we can appreciate the contributions
of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
and conductor David Shallon; the harp
in Kennst du das Land, the Wagnerian
horns in In der Frühe, the
solo violin in Gebet, the intimate
orchestration of Schlafendes Jesuskind
as well as the aerial winds in Karwoche
and the burnished romanticism, powerful
tread and coiled orchestration of Wo
find' ich Trost? There are
two versions of Kennst du das Land,
the first from 1890 and the second
from three years later, though the differences
are really minimal. Shirai is joined
by Protschka for some of the Spanisches
Liederbuch in the second disc, here
accompanied once more by the agile Hartmut
Höll. Protschka is agile and delicate
in equal measure in Wenn du zu den
Blumen gehst and is strong but subtle,
with a fine cynical admixture, in Herz,
verzage nicht geschwind. In fact
both he and Shirai prove once again
powerful advocates for this music.
The original release
of Manuel Venegas came without libretto
- an omission for which Capriccio has
now made ample amends. Full texts of
all songs and the operatic excerpts
are included – German and English –
and there is a useful introduction to
the problems and complexities of these
works. Idiomatic and resourceful, these
are welcome reissues and strongly commended.
Jonathan Woolf
for
details 
Württemberg Chamber Choir, Stuttgart/Dieter
Kurz (chorus master)