Search - Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Hans Pfitzner, Hartmut Höll :: Hans Pfitzner Lieder

Admirably performed and recorded, but ...

R. J. Stove | Gardenvale, Victoria Australia | 05/29/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"The songs of Hans Pfitzner (1869-1949) should be substantially better known than they are. No-one would allege that they match Richard Strauss's or Hugo Wolf's best word-setting - in any event Pfitzner, like Strauss and Mahler, attained more distinctive results with voice and orchestra than in Lieder - but they have great beauties of their own. The trouble is that these beauties tend to be a bit same-ish; the typical Pfitzner Lied lacks the ferocious vividness by which Wolf made poem after poem his own, just as it lacks Strauss's melodic splendor. Even the shortest of the works included here will often sound like recitatives from an otherwise unwritten opera, thanks partly to Pfitzner's symphonic rather than epigrammatic outlook, and his habit of ignoring his texts' strophic implications. But sometimes Pfitzner achieves complete success: in IST DER HIMMEL DARUM he manages a Gemuetlichkeit worthy of Brahms, while at the other extreme ABENDROT is full of Wagnerian passion. Even the weaker items are well worth hearing, and should at least be allowed the occasional place in recitals.



Now and then Pfitzner songs have turned up on record, generally with less than first-rate artists, on obscure German labels. Indispensible to any Lieder buff are the prewar Pfitzner recordings by that superb baritone Gerhard Huesch, which carry the imprimatur of the composer himself at the keyboard.



In 1982, when Orfeo first released this collection, Fischer-Dieskau revealed his age only with some slight blustering in his upper range. The rest of his vocalism on this CD is almost as refined as it was back when those postwar Bach cantata and Passion recordings of his first made music-lovers realize that one of Germany's greatest modern singers had emerged. Hartmut Hoell matches F-D insight for insight, fully in command of Pfitzner's pianistic writing (which tends to be more elaborate and often more interesting than his vocal lines); while the sound quality is flawless, with a perfect balance between singer and instrumentalist. F-D even contributes a (very good, Wyndham-Lewis-style) cover painting of Pfitzner himself.



BUT ... who was the pinhead who decided to issue this full-price recital of rarities without either English translations OR ANY BOOKLET NOTES IN ANY LANGUAGE? Orfeo simply provides the original German texts, with the names of their authors. Biographical data about Pfitzner: zilch. Comments on the songs: zilch. Indications as to where these songs came in Pfitzner's career, why he set the poems he did set, and so forth: zilch. (As it happens they are nearly all early works; Pfitzner, like Strauss, confined most of his song-writing to the years before 1914.) Hints as to how F-D and Hoell came to explore this elusive, and not always immediately rewarding, material in the first place: zilch. Can anyone imagine Naxos being so slack? No way. Yes, it's nice to know that the booklet was "printed by Johannes Alt GmbH", but some of us would rather read about Pfitzner's creativity than about Orfeo's production processes.



This is the type of purchaser-be-damned approach which, during the late 1990s, helped ruin the whole mainstream classical record industry. Composer and performers alike deserve much better.



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