Wolfgang Holzmair – The Philips Recitals

From Haydn to Eisler: the collected Philips recordings of WOLFGANG HOLZMAIR, a supreme art-song interpreter, including many long-deleted albums.

Wolfgang Holzmair has long been recognised as one of today’s most accomplished and intelligent Lieder singers. He brings a refinement and subtlety to his performances worthy of the great German Lieder baritones, but it is the silky elegance of his voice that has always seduced listeners and critics: the golden, tenorial top as well as his rich, soulful lower register.

In celebration of his 70th birthday, this set brings together his complete Philips recitals for the first time, as well as his 1995 recording for Koch of the Hollywood Songbook by Hanns Eisler. The box is ordered by musical chronology, beginning with the folksong-like simplicity of Haydn’s solo-vocal idiom, a quartet of exquisite Mozart Lieder and the Beethoven cycle – An die ferne Geliebte – that became the keystone for the Romantic artsong tradition.

Here and in the major cycles by Schubert and Schumann, Holzmair is partnered by Imogen Cooper, whose sensitivity to every turn of phrase and harmony places her in the pantheon of great Lieder pianists. Their partnership ranged beyond the acknowledged masterpieces of the tradition to include an imaginative recital of Eichendorff settings by Schumann, Hugo Wolf and Aribert Reimann, as well as a selection of Lieder by both Robert and Clara Schumann, including two songs – Rose, Meer und Sonner et Aus den Östlichen Rosen – which were not included on the original Philips album.

For his Philips albums of repertoire outside the central Austro-German Romantic tradition, Holzmair found sympathetic partners in Gérard Wyss and Maria Beloussova. These include two French albums and a pair of retrospectively tinted cycles by Ernst Krenek. In all cases, critics cherished Holzmair’s conversational confidence of phrasing, and a poetic understanding capable of creating mounting subtle effects that can unify the disparate elements of a song cycle around a subtle evolution of mood.

This original covers set concludes with the German Requiem of Brahms, recorded in San Francisco with Herbert Blomstedt and widely praised as among the most lyrically affecting of modern versions. The booklet includes an appreciation of Holzmair’s art by James Jolly and a memoir of their working partnership by Imogen Cooper.