... Into the Deepest Sea! by Sarah Wegener

Various composers

Sarah Wegener | Götz Payer

... Into the Deepest Sea!

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: CAvi
UPC: 4260085533749
Catnr: AVI 8553374
Release date: 08 December 2017
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Label
CAvi

UPC
4260085533749

Catalogue number
AVI 8553374

Release date
08 December 2017

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

SARAH WEGENER – her first Solo Recital (from her remarks in the booklet)

“In this day and age, why another CD featuring art song? From different sources we hear that art song is going through a crisis, and that the traditional vocal recital format lacks an audience and is no longer up-to-date.

Many people seem to regard the Lied genre as elitist, musty and outmoded. How can one explain this? The act of singing, in itself, cannot be the problem. People are fortunately still singing in many different contexts and venues: in nurseries, schools, choirs, in the shower, and in television contests. What comes more naturally to a human being than singing songs? Perhaps we should avoid terms such as “Lied” and “art song”. They might sound too artificial. Perhaps the supposed lack of interest has to do with the texts, which are sometimes more than two centuries old…

Nevertheless, for us the answer is clear: these songs and texts have lost nothing of their current relevance. They still have the capacity to profoundly stir the emotions of listeners and performers. In short: the “Lied” lives on!..... Like the forest, the sea is a literary topos of yearning: elementary and profound like love itself, as stormy as unbridled passion. And it can become the place where we meet face to face with Death…..

Two particular aspects were important to us in making this recording. On the one hand, we wanted to avoid the above-mentioned artificiality by striving to make music in a passionate, authentic manner, following the natural curves of speech. This inspired us, in turn, to apply a thoroughly personal, undogmatic approach to the songs we had chosen. On the other hand, we knew we did not want to amass a loose collection of songs or groups of songs. We wanted to have a unifying element, a thread that would run through the entire programme and would enable us to feature the most varied types of composition alongside one another in a meaningful way………”

Artist(s)

Götz Payer (piano)

Sarah Wegener (soprano)

The soprano Sarah Wegener is on the best path to a great career (...). Sarah Wegener wants to, and can, sing everything. SWR, 2012 Sarah Wegener enthrals listeners with the richness and warmth of her voice and approaches every role in a chamber musical way, whether it be contemporary, classical or romantic repertoire. She regularly works with Philippe Herreweghe, Thomas Hengelbrock, Emilio Pomàrico, Tonu Kaljuste, Heinz Holliger, Frieder Bernius and Michael Hofstetter. Concerts and recitals have taken her to the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, RuhrTriennale, Rheingau Music Festival, Konzerthaus Berlin, Tonhalle Zurich, Wiener Konzerthaus, and to the Bozar Brussels. Following her double bass studies, the British-German soprano studied singing with Prof. Jaeger-Böhm in Stuttgart and took part in masterclasses with Dame Gwyneth Jones...

The soprano Sarah Wegener is on the best path to a great career (...). Sarah Wegener wants to, and can, sing everything. SWR, 2012

Sarah Wegener enthrals listeners with the richness and warmth of her voice and approaches every role in a chamber musical way, whether it be contemporary, classical or romantic repertoire. She regularly works with Philippe Herreweghe, Thomas Hengelbrock, Emilio Pomàrico, Tonu Kaljuste, Heinz Holliger, Frieder Bernius and Michael Hofstetter. Concerts and recitals have taken her to the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, RuhrTriennale, Rheingau Music Festival, Konzerthaus Berlin, Tonhalle Zurich, Wiener Konzerthaus, and to the Bozar Brussels.

Following her double bass studies, the British-German soprano studied singing with Prof. Jaeger-Böhm in Stuttgart and took part in masterclasses with Dame Gwyneth Jones and Renée Morloc.

Highly regarded as a performer of both classical and romantic repertoire, as well as contemporary compositions, Sarah Wegener recently sang Dvořak’s Stabat Mater and Haydn’s Sieben letzte Worte (Philippe Herreweghe, Orchestre des Champs- Élysées, Collegium Vocale Gent), Beethoven’s Funeral Cantata and Mass in C major (Hans- Christoph Rademann, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart), and, in a sensational concert in Graz, Strauss‘ Vier letzte Lieder. In 2015 she made her debut with the NDR Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Hengelbrock performing Jörg Widmann’s Dunkle Saiten. The composer previously dedicated the solo part in his work Labyrinth III to her, which she premiered in 2014 to great acclaim at the Kölner Philharmonie with the WDR Symphony Orchestra under Emilio Pomàrico. Further performances of the piece took her to the Concertgebouw Amsterdam (Emilio Pomàrico, Radio Filharmonisch Orkest) and Casa da Música (Peter Rundel, Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto).

Sarah Wegener has formed a close artistic relationship with the composer Georg Friedrich Haas. In the 2015/16 season she made her debuts at the Royal Opera House London and Deutsche Oper Berlin in his new opera Morgen und Abend. The composer also dedicated the Lieder cycle ...wie stille brannte das Licht to the soprano, drawing on her unique ability to interpret microtonal music. She was nominated for “Singer of the Year” by Opernwelt magazine in 2011 for her interpretation of the main role of Nadja in his opera Bluthaus, which she performed at the Schwetzinger SWR Festival, Theater Bonn, Wiener Festwochen, Kampnagel Hamburg and Staatstheater Saarbrücken. She returned to Schwetzingen in 2013 with the opera Thomas and Dido for string quartet and soprano. She also sang Haas’s composition ATTHIS with the Ensemble musikFabrik at the Philharmonie Luxembourg and with musicians of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra as part of musica viva.

Her discography comprises recordings with Frieder Bernius of arias by Justin Heinrich Knecht (Carus), Korngold’s Die stumme Serenade (CPO) and Schubert’s Lazarus (Carus), as well as Rossini’s Petite Messe solennelle under Tonu Kaljuste (Carus) and a CD with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra under Heinz Holliger (Hänssler Classic).

Sarah Wegener will kick off the 2016/17 season with her first collaboration with Kent Nagano and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal: she will perform Mozart’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion and Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem in several concerts in Montréal. She will also sing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio on tour with the Basel Chamber Orchestra as well as Mozart’s Litaniae and Schubert’s Mass No. 5 with the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam. In celebration of the inauguration of the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie she will perform Mahler’s 8th Symphony with the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg and Kent Nagano. Recitals will also take her to the SWR RheinVokal Festival and the Halle Handel Festival.

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Composer(s)

Edvard Grieg

Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping to develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvořák did in Finland and Bohemia, respectively. Grieg is regarded as simultaneously nationalistic and cosmopolitan in his orientation, for although born in Bergen and buried there, he travelled widely throughout Europe, and considered his music to express both the beauty of Norwegian rural life and the culture of Europe as a whole. He is...

Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping to develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvořák did in Finland and Bohemia, respectively.
Grieg is regarded as simultaneously nationalistic and cosmopolitan in his orientation, for although born in Bergen and buried there, he travelled widely throughout Europe, and considered his music to express both the beauty of Norwegian rural life and the culture of Europe as a whole. He is the most celebrated person from the city of Bergen, with numerous statues depicting his image, and many cultural entities named after him.

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Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer. Schubert already died before his 32nd birthday, but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical and early Romantic eras and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.
It was in the genre of the Lied that Schubert made his most indelible mark. Prior to Schubert's influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities engendered by the stirrings of Romantic nationalism. Schubert expanded the potentialities of the genre like no other composer before.

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Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer is such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.
Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and by later writers, as both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Within his meticulous structures is embedded, however, a highly romantic nature.

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Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; his tone poems, including Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, and An Alpine Symphony; and other instrumental works such as Metamorphosen and his Oboe Concerto. Strauss was also a prominent conductor in Western Europe and the Americas, enjoying quasi-celebrity status as his compositions became standards of orchestral and operatic repertoire. Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.

Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; his tone poems, including Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, and An Alpine Symphony; and other instrumental works such as Metamorphosen and his Oboe Concerto. Strauss was also a prominent conductor in Western Europe and the Americas, enjoying quasi-celebrity status as his compositions became standards of orchestral and operatic repertoire.
Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.

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Frank Bridge

Jean Sibelius

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) was the composer who gave Finland its own sound, right when this nation was struggling to detach itself from Russia. Sibelius wrote several impressive symphonic poems - among which Finlandia, Lemminkäinen-suite, Oceaniden, Tapiola - for he took inspiration from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. He was just as original as a symphonist: his Seven Symphonies are just as much answers to the question how the genre should develop after Tchaikovsky's death.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) was the composer who gave Finland its own sound, right when this nation was struggling to detach itself from Russia. Sibelius wrote several impressive symphonic poems - among which Finlandia, Lemminkäinen-suite, Oceaniden, Tapiola - for he took inspiration from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. He was just as original as a symphonist: his Seven Symphonies are just as much answers to the question how the genre should develop after Tchaikovsky's death.

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