Christian Gerhaher, Gerold Huber - Schumann: Dichterliebe (2004)

Christian Gerhaher is the latest in a long line of expressive and intelligent baritones who have made a specialty of German lieder. With recordings of Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Brahms' Vier ernste Gesänge, and Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise, and Schwanengesang already to his credit, Gerhaher has already cut a considerable swath through the standard repertoire of German lieder. With this disc of Schumann's setting of Heine's Dichterliebe and of Lenau's poems grouped as a funeral tombeau, Gerhaher has chosen poems about love, madness, and death by the most literate and arguably the most romantic of the German lieder composers. Gerhaher has an appealing voice: strong and agile with a warm tone and a round sound. Gerhaher has a fine sense of the emotions expressed in the music from the heartfelt irony of the Heine lieder to the attenuated sentimentality of the Lenau lieder. And Gerhaher has a firm grasp of the symbiosis of words and music and the levels of meaning commingled in their fusion. If Gerhaher's performances have a flaw, it is his ambition to do it all right now, to infuse his performances with so much significance that they nearly sink under their own interpretive weight. RCA's sound is big and close but perhaps too intimate.