For some reason – I hope simply the sublime beauty of the music – my post of Wilhelm Kempff playing the slow movement of the Hammerklavier – attracted more views than anything I've put up in recent times. So I'll try another piece of sublime music, which I just caught on Radio 3. It's Benjamin Appl singing Schubert's 'Im Abendrot' in an orchestral arrangement by Max Reger. Does it top Fischer-Dieskau or Hans Hotter with Gerald Moore at the piano? Does it matter? It is one of Schubert's most beautiful songs, and that is surely enough.
Unfortunately I cannot lift this version from YouTube, but this link should take you there...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ7MpUNb92s
Tuesday 28 November 2023
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No Nige, it doesn't matter. But, notwithstanding this, nothing can erase Hans Hotter in 1957 with Gerald Moore. A full minute longer, and transcribed down to suit his stop-the-clocks bass-baritone, Appl's lyric baritone simply (for me) does not have the gravitas, the sorrow, to have me holding my breath for much of that minute and a half. Imperishable.
ReplyDeleteIt arrived after all! And I quite agree about Hotter.
DeleteI seem to recall a British tv show that ran briefly on American public television in the 1970s (?) that featured puppets or marionettes in an English country house who would break into performances of Schubert lieder. I cannot find any trace of such a show.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, thanks very much for your blog.
Don Flanagan
Wow. I'm sorry I missed that!
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