The Last Epiphany by Thilo Dahlmann

Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Norbert Glanzberg

Thilo Dahlmann | Hedayet Djeddikar

The Last Epiphany

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: Challenge Classics
UPC: 0608917293425
Catnr: CC 72934
Release date: 07 July 2023
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Label
Challenge Classics

UPC
0608917293425

Catalogue number
CC 72934

Release date
07 July 2023

"...the real reason to hear The Last Epiphany is Glanzberg's Holocaust Lieder, a work for which Dahlmann audibly demonstrates his reverence."

Fanfare Magazine, 01-5-2024

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

Press

About the album

Thilo Dahlmann and Hedayet Djeddikar.
"I sow, I see no seed, and I remain mournfully silent at home." With these words of Johann Mayerhofer full of mourning and melancholy from Schubert's "Abendstern", we as performers look back on the content of this CD. It juxtaposes compositions that could hardly be more opposite.

The past century, like so many before and after it, has not only sown good seeds. Norbert Glanzberg had to experience one of the greatest human catastrophes of the century himself, the Holocaust. Long after the end of the war, he managed to clothe the horror he suffered in music through the words of other persecutees and victims of National Socialism. Music that could not be more beautiful in many places. A beauty that is only painful to bear in view of the texts set to music.

In selecting the pieces for this recording, we were guided by Norbert Glanzberg's compositional approach of countering horror with beauty. Therefore, folk song settings by Johannes Brahms form the beginning of this CD. Songs that, like few other songs in the Romantic lied repertoire, can embody the greatest possible innocence and impartiality in text and music.

It is precisely this contrast that illustrates in our eyes the breaking of human and civilisational culture through the horrors of the Holocaust. A "break-up" that Norbert Glanzberg has masterfully set to music in his cycle "In Memoriam".

Thilo Dahlmann und Hedayet Djeddikar.
"Ich säe, ich sehe keine Saat, und ich bleibe klagend stumm zu Hause." Mit diesen von Trauer und Melancholie erfüllten Worten Johann Mayerhofers aus Schuberts "Abendstern" blicken wir als Interpreten auf den Inhalt dieser CD zurück. Sie stellt Kompositionen nebeneinander, die gegensätzlicher kaum sein könnten.

Das vergangene Jahrhundert hat, wie so viele davor und danach, nicht nur gute Samen gesät. Norbert Glanzberg musste eine der größten menschlichen Katastrophen des Jahrhunderts selbst erleben, den Holocaust. Noch lange nach Kriegsende gelang es ihm, das von ihm erlittene Grauen mit den Worten anderer Verfolgter und Opfer des Nationalsozialismus in Musik zu kleiden. Musik, die an vielen Stellen nicht schöner sein könnte. Eine Schönheit, die nur angesichts der vertonten Texte schmerzlich zu ertragen ist.

Bei der Auswahl der Stücke für diese Aufnahme haben wir uns von Norbert Glanzbergs kompositorischem Ansatz leiten lassen, dem Grauen das Schöne entgegenzusetzen. Den Anfang dieser CD bilden daher Volksliedvertonungen von Johannes Brahms. Lieder, die wie wenige andere Lieder des romantischen Liedrepertoires die größtmögliche Unschuld und Unbefangenheit in Text und Musik verkörpern können.

Es ist genau dieser Kontrast, der uns den Bruch der menschlichen und zivilisatorischen Kultur durch die Schrecken des Holocaust vor Augen führt. Ein "Zusammenbruch", den Norbert Glanzberg in seinem Zyklus "In Memoriam" meisterhaft vertont hat.

Artist(s)

Thilo Dahlmann (bass-baritone)

After studying singing with Ulf Bästlein, Berthold Schmid, Guido Baehr and Wolfgang Millgramm at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, where he passed his concert exam with distinction in 2007, bassbaritone Thilo Dahlmann was a member of the International Opera Studio at the Zurich Opera House. He received important impulses there from the baritone Roland Hermann. Master classes with Charles Spencer, Michael Volle and Rudolf Piernay completed his artistic development, as did his collaboration with Carol Meyer-Bruetting.
He was awarded first prize at the North Rhine-Westphalia State Singing Competition. In 2013 he was awarded the Lied Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Culture and the Nikolaus Bruhns Singer Prize.
At Zurich Opera House he sang numerous smaller roles under conductors such as Franz Welser-Möst, Nello Santi and Philippe Jordan. Guest contracts have also taken him to the Deutsche Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf, the Wuppertaler Bühnen and the Theater Koblenz. His staged interpretation of the song cycle "Notturno" by Othmar Schoeck at the Theater Sankt Gallen received a broad and enthusiastic response from audiences and critics. Concert performances of Mozart's "Don Giovanni", "Parsifal" by Richard Wagner and Schreker's "Die Gezeichneten" took him to the Concertgebouw Amsterdam.
Above all, however, Thilo Dahlmann is active as a concert and lieder singer. If his repertoire ranges from early Baroque vocal music to numerous world premieres, the focus of his repertoire is on Bach, Handel and the great Romantic oratorio roles. These have led him under conductors such as Thomas Hengelbrock, Pieter Jan Leusink, Michael Alexander Willens, Jaap van Zweden, Christophe Rousset, Daniel Reuss, Frieder Bernius, Peter Neumann, Richard Mailänder, Hansjörg Albrecht, Christophe Rousset, Christoph and Andreas Spering in concert halls such as the Paris, Cologne and Essen Philharmonie, the Tonhalle Zurich, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden.
He has sung a wide repertoire of lieder with pianists such as Hedayet Djeddikar, Götz Payer, Ulrich Rademacher, Charles Spencer and Doriana Tchakarova.

He has been a guest at the Folle Journée in Nantes, Bilbao and Tokyo, the Halle Handel Festival, the Nuremberg Gluck Festival, the Leipzig Bach Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Aix-en-Provence Easter Festival and the Salzburg Festival, as well as at the opening concert of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg.
Radio (WDR; hr, SWR, NDR, France Musique, NHK, MDR) and television (Arte, ZDF, Mezzo-TV) recordings complement his artistic activities, as do CD and DVD recordings (Carus, cpo, querstand, DECCA). Accompanied by Charles Spencer, he recorded a solo debut CD with Schubert Lieder, which was released by the Viennese label Capriccio. Most recently, the Dutch label Challenge released a highly acclaimed CD of Thilo Dahlmann together with pianist Hedayet Djeddikar, on which they recorded songs by Johannes Brahms and Norbert Glanzberg.
In addition to his artistic activities, Thilo Dahlmann is professor of singing at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts and has taught at the Music Universities in Cologne, Frankfurt and Graz.

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Hedayet Jonas Djeddikar (piano)

Composer(s)

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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Norbert Glanzberg

Press

...the real reason to hear The Last Epiphany is Glanzberg's Holocaust Lieder, a work for which Dahlmann audibly demonstrates his reverence.
Fanfare Magazine, 01-5-2024

All in all, a gentle appeal to humanity
Neue Musikzeitung, 30-4-2024

The accompaniment of Swiss pianist Hedayet Jonas Djeddikar provides constant effective support to this bass-baritone with very extensive vocal means.
Classica, 01-4-2024

...the programming provides a musical-emotional experience in itself that is, to my knowledge, entirely unprecedented. The fine singing combined with the superb programming makes for a powerful disc indeed. Strongly recommended
Fanfare Magazine, 01-3-2024

Very tonal songs, immersed in a musical atmosphere of delicate, highly lyrical romanticism in a pure “world of yesterday” spirit. They are very beautiful, and they find themselves in strange, mysterious, fascinating consonance with popular humanism that infuses Brahms' revisited folklore: made both at their best by this interpretation.
Classic Voice, 01-3-2024

As a whole, still an original program and well worth listening.
Luister, 01-9-2023

Dahlmann has color in both the high and low register, Djeddikar makes the Bösendorfer Konzertflügel Imperial from 1922 shimmer.
De Volkskrant, 27-7-2023

The simple is the beautiful - and the beautiful is a way of at least dealing with unbearable suffering. This hope seems to shine behind Nobert Glanzberg's song cycle "In Memoriam", composed in 1983, which deliberately takes up late Romantic traditions to tell of unprecedented crimes and unimaginable torments in a tonal and highly melodic way. The poems of persecuted and murdered resistance fighters selected by the composer similarly rescue dignity and humanity in the colours and forms of a cultural tradition. Thilo Dahlmann and his accompanist Hedayet Jonas Djeddikar are aware that this beauty is almost unbearable. They therefore approach the songs with the required historical precision, which is reflected in the clear, detailed diction of the bass-baritone and the sovereign, completely unagitated performance of the pianist. The result is an often oppressive, purposefully disturbing, but also deeply moving recording, for which Dahlmann and Djeddikar have found a conclusion that could not be more fitting. After Brahms and Glanzberg, Schubert's "Abendstern" once again plunges the world into twilight.
Kulturabdruck.de, 19-7-2023

One voice, two hands, an hour of Lieder and a mighty concert grand piano: the 'less is more' approach to this intimist record achieves maximum effect. Glanzberg's songs on texts by war witnesses are intimate and intense, dark and hushed - like a diary full of painful secrets. Dahlmann's voice fits this palette perfectly. Djeddikar's delicate fingerpicking ballet makes the songs tremble with emotion. And then there is the unsung hero: the Bösendorfer Konzertflügel Imperial (1922) that sinks your ears into the sound like a warm knife in a lump of butter.
De Standaard, 19-7-2023

Thilo Dahlmann and Hedayet Djeddikar turn to the songs in such a way that the texts become very clear without any exaggeration.
Pizzicato, 07-7-2023