Soprano Claire Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn follow their earlier discs of songs by Mussorgsky, Grieg and Grainger with this thoughtfully assembled Schoenberg collection. As they point out in a sleeve note, Schoenberg’s songs are very much a neglected part of his output, but in the first third of his career, at least, it was poetry that fired his creativity and through setting it he found his voice.
The 24 songs that Booth and Glynn include are taken from six different sets, grouped thematically, so that there are three songs under the heading of “Expectation”, three under “Flesh”, three “Nocturne” and so on. Most were composed in the first few years of the 20th century, though they also include one of the two songs of Schoenberg’s Op 14 from 1908, when his music was just beginning to move into atonality, and another from Op 48, written 25 years later, in a fully fledged 12-tone style; Booth also sings one of Tove’s arias from the lushly romantic oratorio Gurrelieder, while Glynn punctuates the sequence with two of the little piano pieces from Schoenberg’s Op 19.
Significantly, they avoid the most important of all the songs with piano, the Stefan George cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens Op 15, which is one of the landmark works of Schoenberg’s atonal period, suggesting that maybe they have plans to record that complete; certainly, the immaculate way in which each number is presented here, with every flick and tremor of the vocal lines and of the piano accompaniments precisely caught, would make that something to relish.
Stream it on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify
