The Ballad Singer
This latest release from the multi-award-winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake features a literary and musical form which inspired the greatest voices of German Romanticism. The foremost poets and composers of the age saw the ballad as a direct link to the folk-minstrels of the past. Frequently ghoulish and sensational in character, ballads satisfied the popular taste for the Gothic. This disc contains some of the greatest examples of the form, including Schubert’s Erlkönig, as well as some fascinating and lesser-known works. The disc also includes selections from the ever popular English ballad tradition.
Gerald Finley’s unrivalled gift for characterization and story-telling, honed both on the stages of opera houses around the world and through his extraordinary Lieder recordings, makes him the ideal performer of these works. This is a genuinely entertaining and original disc.
Performed with: Julius Drake, piano
April 2011
Hyperion
Tracklisting
Beethoven: Lieder (6), Op. 75
- III. Aus Goethes Faust
Loewe, C: Edward, Op. 1 No. 1 (Herder)
Loewe, C: Die wandelnde Glocke, Op. 20 No. 3
Schubert: Erlkönig, D328
Excerpt,
- I. Die Löwenbraut
Excerpt,
- I. Der Schatzgräber
anon.: 49 Deutsche Volkslieder, WoO33
XXIX. Es war ein Markgraf überm Rhein
Excerpt,
- XLIV. Der Feuerreiter
Mahler: Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (Des Knaben Wunderhorn)
Stanford: La Belle Dame sans merci (John Keats) (1877)
anon.: Lord Randall
Sullivan, A: The Lost Chord
Emanuel: The Desert
Porter, C: The Tale of the Oyster