Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

Hyperion offers both CDs, and downloads in a number of formats. The site is also available in several languages.

Please use the dropdown buttons to set your preferred options, or use the checkbox to accept the defaults.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

The Complete Songs, Vol. 7 - Benjamin Appl

Benjamin Appl (baritone), Graham Johnson (piano)
Studio Master FLAC & ALAC downloads available
CD-Quality:
Studio Master:
CD-Quality:
Studio Master:
 
 
Label: Hyperion
Recording details: December 2016
All Saints' Church, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by David Hinitt
Release date: April 2018
Total duration: 77 minutes 28 seconds

Cover artwork: Photograph of Benjamin Appl by Sim Canetty-Clarke
 
Please note that physical copies of this album purchased from our website come as CD-R copies rather than commercially pressed CDs. Booklets and other packaging are as normal.

The last private pupil of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Benjamin Appl has already been hailed as ‘Lieder royalty’ (The Spectator). Further proof comes with this distinguished Hyperion debut: volume 7 of our complete Brahms songs.

Benjamin Appl appears courtesy of Sony Classical.

Reviews

‘What’s remarkable is Appl’s sheer fluency as a Lieder singer, his ease with the idiom and his naturalness of manner—words and line sit together just as they should … Johnson’s notes offer the usual wealth of wisdom and wit, while Hyperion’s sound is immaculate—especially when heard as a Studio Master download’ (Gramophone)

‘Johnson is alive to every juicy nuance of the richly detailed accompaniments … [Appl] brings many beautiful details to his reading’ (BBC Music Magazine)» More
PERFORMANCE
RECORDING

‘This is a very beautifully planned complete Brahms … what I like about this particular one is [Graham Johnson's] focus on the Mediterranean Brahms, which is is probably the Brahms we know least’ (BBC Record Review)

Other recommended albums

Waiting for content to load...
This is the seventh volume of a series of ten that will present the entire piano-accompanied songs and vocal works of Johannes Brahms. As such it is a companion to the series undertaken by Hyperion for the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Fauré and Strauss.

Brahms issued the majority of his songs in groups collected by opus number. There is a tendency in modern scholarship to suggest that he envisaged performances of his songs in these original opus number groupings. Of course one cannot deny that some planning (though of a rather variable kind) went into the arrangement of these ‘song bouquets’ (the composer’s own expression) for publication, but good order and cohesion in printed form (as in an anthology where poems are arranged to be discovered by the reader in a certain sequence), though pleasing to the intellect, do not automatically transfer to the world of the recital platform where one encounters a host of different practical problems, casting (male or female singer) and key-sequences (high or low voice) among them.

Printed poetry collections are as lovingly assembled as an opus of a composer’s varied settings, but this does not mean the poems therein are designed to be read aloud from cover to cover: the compiler of these volumes, whether or not the poet himself, would expect items to be selected by the reader according to taste or need. The anthology (or indeed opus number) might be likened to a well-ordered jewel case from which precious items may be extracted for use, depending on the occasion: the wearing in public of every item therein on a single occasion would be both impractical and vulgar. There is little evidence, especially from concert practice of the time (where items from the Schubert and Schumann cycles were often ruthlessly excerpted), that Brahms’ publications were conceived within a spirit of cyclic unity that called for an integral performance of the entire group.

Each volume of the Hyperion edition takes a journey through Brahms’ career. The songs are not quite sung in chronological order (Brahms had a way of including earlier songs in later opus numbers) but they do appear here more or less in the order that the songs were presented to the world. Each recital represents a different journey through the repertoire (and thus through Brahms’ life). In a number of these Hyperion recitals an opus number is presented in its entirety. In the case of this disc there is no such complete presentation, although the four relatively seldom sung songs of Op 63 to the poetry of Max von Schenkendorf make up a group that might easily have been published in one opus without the two Felix Schumann and three Klaus Groth settings that are added on to them. Apart from this there are four settings of traditional or folksong texts, two settings each of Hoffman von Fallersleben, Daumer and Kopisch, and one each of Fleming, Goethe, Reinhold, Schack and Lemcke whose names are represented elsewhere in the Brahms song catalogue. There are a few poets whom Brahms set only once, and Alfred von Meissner’s Nachwirkung is the only song to words by that poet.

Far from dreaming of complete evenings of his songs in public performance, Brahms preferred to hear no more than three of his own songs in any one concert. This astonishing information comes from an invaluable book of essays—K Hamilton & N Loges, eds.: Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance (Cambridge: CUP, 2014). The conventions of music in the home, where so many songs were first heard and discussed in an environment of lively and cultivated enthusiasm, did not include listeners buckling down in respectful silence to a substantial sequence of songs, as if they were at a public concert. Brahms seems to have been happiest hearing his songs as Hausmusik and surrounded by supportive informality—and I daresay Schubert would have said the same about the Schubertiads. The present-day enthusiasm for hidden, implicit, unknown or concealed connections between songs seeks to feed the appetite for a cycle-hungry recital format favoured in the twenty-first century, but almost unknown in the nineteenth.

Graham Johnson © 2018

Other albums in this series

Waiting for content to load...
Waiting for content to load...
Waiting for content to load...