Danish soprano Inger Dam-Jensen had her musical education at
the Royal Danish Academy of Music and the Danish Opera Academy.
A busy international career came her way after she won the prestigious ‘Singer
of the World’ competition in Cardiff in 1993. She has sung
with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis,
the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Bernard Haitink, the
Philharmonia Orchestra under Christoph von Dohnányi, the
Orchestra of the Bastille under James Conlon, with the Sydney
Symphony Orchestra under Edo de Waart and with the Toronto Symphony
Orchestra under Thomas
Dausgaard to mention a few world class ensembles. She appeared
at the Opéra de Paris, Covent Garden, Geneva and has a
long list of roles with the Royal Danish Opera. Despite having
recorded quite extensively this is, as far as I have been able
to find out, her first solo disc. A year and a half ago I reviewed
a disc in the Naxos series of Grieg’s orchestral music,
where she was soloist in most of his orchestral songs (see
review).
I found her eminently well suited to those songs, where she exhibited
lyrical beauty as well as dramatic power in
En svane.
With the masterly Malcolm Martineau at the piano she gives us
almost seventy minutes of excellent Strauss songs, not all of
them the most frequently performed. Most of Strauss’s songs
were written during the last two decades of the 19
th century
- after that he concentrated on opera. In 1918 however, he discovered
the voice of Elisabeth Schumann and wrote a number of songs with
her in mind, including the remarkable six Brentano songs Op.
68. Inger Dam-Jensen includes four of these as well as two of
the five Op. 69 songs and the three Ophelia songs Op. 67 with
texts by Karl Simrock and naturally based on Shakespeare. The
other three songs in that group were Goethe settings. Op. 66
by the way is the song-cycle
Krämerspiegel, also
from 1918. Apart from a couple of songs in the intervening years
he was not to return to the genre until the very end of his life
and
Vier letzte Lieder. We should not however forget the
little song
Malven, that was found among the soprano Maria
Jeritza’s papers upon her death in 1982 and which was belatedly
premiered by Kiri Te Kanawa in 1985.
Compared to the earlier songs the 1918 efforts are harsher, more
dissonant and not so immediately accessible. They are in many
ways however more expressive and exploratory and might very well
be regarded as the apex of Strauss’s modernism as a song-writer.
The Ophelia songs are certainly mad songs with their angularity,
changes of tempo and seemingly haphazard structure. The Brentano
songs are not very frequently heard either and when they are
performed it is often in the much later (1940) orchestral versions.
I reviewed Ricarda Merbeth’s recording a while ago (see
review).
The piano versions are kinder to the singer - I could never imagine
Elisabeth Schumann singing them with orchestra - and Inger Dam-Jensen,
who anyway has a larger voice with more heft - manages them with
beautiful assured singing.
Amor, in particular, is lovely.
I am not quite so convinced by her reading of the Ophelia trio
- she doesn’t seem to be the ‘mad’ type, sounding
as healthily normal and cute as the cover photo. Good to have
the songs anyway.
She is better suited to many of the earlier songs where she depicts
the restrained nervousness of
Ständchen, the soft
and inward, almost hesitant
Ach Lieb, ich muss nun scheiden,
the beautiful legato in
Liebeshymnus, the lovely pianissimo
in
Meinem Kinde, the lively and naughty
Muttertändelei and
the endearing but rather monochrome
Wiegenlied. And maybe
this is the weakness that in the end makes me feel that I have
been on a pleasant journey through roughly one eighth of Strauss’s
Lieder landscape in the company of two most charming and eloquent
guides. I just didn’t get to know all those secrets that
I had hoped would be revealed.
Even so a pleasant journey with no rough ends is always something
to be grateful for and I was taken to some remote corners that
I have only rarely visited before. The acoustic environment cannot
be faulted and it is only a pity that the ‘guidebook’ doesn’t
include the original poems, just English translations. Incidentally
the booklet says ‘transliterations’ but ‘transliterate’ implies ‘to
represent or spell (a letter or word) in the characters of another
alphabet’ (The New Penguin English Dictionary): one transliterates
a Russian text from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. Let me
just add that the original texts are available at the
Altara website.
Göran Forsling
Track listing
1.
Ich schwebe, Op. 48 No. 2 [2:02]
2.
Ständchen, Op. 17 No. 2 [2:37]
3.
Ach, Lieb, ich muss nun scheiden! Op. 21 No. 3 [1:54]
4.
Einerlei, Op. 69 No. 3 [2:36]
5.
Der Stern, Op. 69 No. 1 [1:52]
6.
Liebeshymnus, Op. 32 No. 3 [2:10]
7.
Freundliche Vision, Op. 48 No. 1 [2:40]
8.
Allerseelen, Op. 10 No. 8 [3:13]
9.
Zueignung, Op. 10 No. 1 [1:48]
10.
Ich wollt ein Sträusslein binden, Op. 68 No. 2 [3:09]
11.
Säusle, liebe Myrth, Op. 68 No. 3 [4:51]
12.
Als mir dein Lied erklang, Op. 68 No. 4 [4:02]
13.
Amor, Op. 68 No. 5 [3:08]
14.
Meinem Kinde, Op. 37 No. 3 [2:53]
15.
Muttertändelei, Op. 43 No. 2 [2:24]
16.
Wiegenlied, Op. 41 No. 1 [4:33]
17.
Hat gesagt bleibt’s nicht dabei, Op. 36 No. 3 [2:02]
18.
Glückes genug, Op. 37 No. 1 [2:34]
19.
Mein Auge, Op. 37 No. 4 [3:00]
20.
Traum durch die Dämmerung, Op. 29 No. 1 [3:11]
21.
Schlagende Herzen, Op. 29 No. 2 [2:34]
22.
Nachtgang, Op. 29 No. 3 [3:04]
Drei Lieder der Ophelia, Op. 67:
23. I.
Wie erkenn ich mein Treulieb vor andern nun? [2:28]
24. II.
Guten Morgen, 's ist Sankt Valentinstag [1:12]
25. III.
Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloss [3:38]
Inger Dam-Jensen (soprano); Malcolm
Martineau (piano) 
