Search - Hugo Wolf (1860-1903), Olaf Baer-baritone, Geoffrey Parsons-piano :: Wolf : Morike Lieder - Olaf Bar

Baritonal intensity, sensitivity, meaning, beauty...

Ingrid Heyn | Melbourne, Australia | 07/01/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I'll admit I'm partial to a good baritone singing art song. And when the baritone is as superb as Olaf Bär, singing some of the most beautiful and meaningful Lieder ever written, with an utterly superb Lieder accompanist (Geoffrey Parsons) who was known world-wide as a specialist in this repertoire, the result is extraordinary.



I actually remember this recording on LP - I believe I was 13 or 14, and I persuaded my parents to buy the double LP boxed set. I fell in love with Olaf Bär's voice the instant I heard it. The timbre is a fine cedar-grain of infinite sensitivity and a tremendous quality of light, shade and variation of colour. Always attuned to the meaning of the words, a master of articulation and completely involved with the Lieder, Olaf Bär is one of those singers who immediately makes an emotional and musical impact.



This CD edition contains all the songs of the record. Once I'd grown up and was collecting music on CDs, I had of course to get hold of this recording on CD as well.



The Lieder on this recording are by Hugo Wolf, using as text the poetry of Mörike, a poet who expressed in all his writings the tug between the religious and the profane, the sensual and the innocent. He was a preacher who suffered his own problems, including a long enslavement to a woman of bad reputation. (Some of Mörike's finest songs express the bewitchment she cast over him.) The songs are simply extraordinary, running from one pale delicate end of the spectrum to the other vividly splashed with colour. The emotional hues vary thus, one moment intensely pure, one moment violently impassioned. Wolf's setting of the words is simply... perfect. The match between melody, harmony, words, rhythm and subtext is superb - a subtle play of shadowed nuances - and it's because of this intricacy in the songs that it takes an equally superb singer to do justice to them.



Olaf Bär does indeed do justice to these songs. Listen to the utterly exquisite "Auf eine Christblume" I; listen to the perilous passion of the songs dedicated to Mörike's beloved (Peregrina I & II); listen to the quiet simplicity of "Schlafendes Jesuskind"; hear the astonished humour of "Storchenbotschaft" or the tinkling joyousness of "Zum neuen Jahr". All of it is wonderfully performed (not just sung) by Olaf Bär and matchlessly played by the late Geoffrey Parsons.



This remains, in my view, one of the finest recordings ever made. Recommended without hesitation."