Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Lieder

ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD

LIEDER.

Steve Kimbrough (baritone); Dalton Baldwin (piano)

Einfache Lieder, Op. 9. Vier Abschiedslieder, Op. 14. Drei Lieder, Op. 18. Starker als der Tod, Op. 27 No, 4. Sonett fur Wien, Op. 41.


The earliest of Korngold's Einfache Lieder ("Simple Songs") were written when he was 14, and you can easily hear in them the qualities that so amazed and impressed his contemporaries. Chief among them is his precociously assured handling of what was then still an 'advanced' (which is to say Straussian) musical language, but the piano writing is also imaginative and the wordsetting is skilful and direct. All six are broadly strophic, but in the second song of the set Korngold shows that he can build an effective dramatic crescendo across the pattern of the stanzas and in the fourth, where the poet's shortbreathed two-line verses could easily have evoked short-breathed music, the fine Brahmsian melody has real strength and span.
The Abschiedslieder ("Songs of Farewell") and the four of Op. 18 show a further development of Korngold's resourceful piano writing and an intensification of his supple response to the meaning and the stresses of words but, alas, a marked loss of the 'simplicity' of the Op. 9 set. The language has now become restlessly but weakly chromatic, no doubt in a search for still more refined expressiveness, but the result is too often pallid and directionless. There are recoveries; of urgency in Starker a/s der Tod, a hymn to love "stronger than death" and, as one might expect, of warmth in the expatriate's nostalgic Sonett für Wien. There is even a drawing of strength from weakness once or twice, as in the third song of Op. 14 where the chromaticism (here intensified by plentiful written-out scoops from note to note) acts as an effective foil for the direct diatonic plain-ness of the central and concluding couplets, but too often the melodic line simply meanders. Still, the proverbial curate would find parts of this record excellent, and he would have little to complain of in the performances. Kimbrough has a warm and pleasing baritone, not always ideally steady (once or twice the music could have benefited from a firmer line) but with a fine variety of colour; he uses words very well. Baldwin is on admirable form (some of these songs must be much more rewarding to play than to sing) and the recording is commendably natural.(Gramophone)