A Vocal Album of Many Colorful Contexts

Samuel Hasselhorn on the cover of his new album

Tomorrow harmonia mundi will release a new album of performances by baritone Samuel Hasselhorn accompanied by the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Łukasz Borowicz. The full title of the album is Urlicht: Songs of Death and Resurrection; and, for those that really cannot wait, the Amazon.com Web page is currently processing pre-orders! For many readers, both the title and the subtitle are likely to invoke associations with Gustav Mahler; so it is no surprise that four of the ten selections on the album are Mahler compositions. Two of them are settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (the boy’s magic horn: old German songs); and the other two draw upon poems by Friedrich Rückert, which Mahler had collected in a set of five given the title Rückert-Lieder. Woven among these selections are vocal settings by (in order of appearance) Engelbert Humperdinck, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Pfitzner, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Walter Braunfels, and Alban Berg.

In the interest of “full disclaimer,” I should make it clear (to those that do not already know) that I am an unabashed sucker for the development of “new music” that took place during that transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in German-speaking countries. I find it a bit interesting that Friedrich Rückert received more attention than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. However, one of the surprises on this album comes from Pfitzner’s setting of “Herr Oluf” (Sir Oluf), a poem by Goethe’s contemporary, Johann Gottfried Herder, which may well have inspired Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” now best known for its vocal setting by Franz Schubert (D. 328).

Those familiar with the Mahler songs will most likely be satisfied with Hasselhorn’s approaches to them. Personally, however, I have to confess to a soft spot for the Korngold selection. This is the aria from Die tote Stadt (the dead city), which begins with the text “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen” (my yearning, my illusion), usually known as “Pierrot’s Tanzlied” (Pierrot’s dance-song). Those that have followed this site for some time probably know that I am a sucker to this opera and have been fortunate enough to see it twice (once on television and once on the stage). Indeed, I recalled those experiences a little less than a year ago, when violinist Bruno Monteiro included a chamber music version of it on one of his albums.

The order of the composers other than Mahler on this album is not a chronological one. However, there is still some sense of a “journey” from the “traditional” rhetoric of Humperdinck to the “adventurous” stance that permeates the entire score of Wozzeck. There is thus some sense of “progression” when one attentively follows how one track leads to another across the entire album. It is through that sense that the entire album transcends any sense of a business-as-usual experience.

Taken as a whole, the album left me thinking about what Hasselhorn’s next endeavor will be!