Friday, December 23, 2022

Stone Records Completes Wolf Project

1885 photograph of Hugo Wolf (from a 1910 postcard, photographer unknown, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

Working my way through Stone Records’ project to record all of the songs of Hugo Wolf has been a lengthy process. The penultimate (tenth) volume in the series was released early in 2020, not too long before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This accounted for the first nineteen of the 51 songs in the Goethe-Lieder collection. The final volume in the series will offer the remaining 32 songs, and it is currently due for release this coming January 6. As of this writing, the only source that is processing pre-orders is Presto Music, which has created a Web page for the release.

Bringing order to the entire collection is not particularly easy. This is a case in which working in the digital domain has advantages. Indexing has been facilitated by the Music app which is included in the software for my Mac hardware. I also have access to a powerful search tool that can be applied to the PDF versions of the booklets for the individual releases. This has not been entirely advantageous, since no booklet was included in the download for the seventh volume, which accounts for the “Weltliche Lieder” portion of the Spanisches Liederbuch collection; and, to add insult to injury (as the cliché goes), the downloaded JPEG image of the back cover was illegible! Fortunately, the back cover image provided by the Amazon.com Web page for this volume was susceptible to text extraction!

The result is that I now have a reference source for the Wolf catalog that is both more complete and more amenable to search than was the Wolf Edition: 150th Anniversary EMI Classics collection, which was released in 2010. EMI could, of course, evoke “star power” for the vocalists that contributed to that album. However, I have to say that I have been consistently satisfied with not only the many vocalists that contributed to the Stone albums but also the piano accompaniment provided through the entire collection by Sholto Kynoch.

Mind you, I have no idea how many readers will be willing to take that deep dive into the Stone albums, no matter how much I relished the entire experience. My initial thoughts on the matter involved having at my disposal a reference that could be consulted in conjunction with recital performances of the Wolf canon. Sadly, the last time I had such a performance experience was in April of 2019, when soprano Sarah Shafer was the vocalist featured in that year’s annual Gift Concert for subscribers and donors, presented by San Francisco Performances. Nevertheless, the Stone program has definitely left me on the lookout for future recital offerings.

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