BBC Legends 3: The Vocal Album

Accounts of art song have been relatively modest over the course of the three BBC Legends releases. The first collection was limited to a single CD consisting entirely of mezzo Janet Baker performing nineteen of the songs composed by Franz Schubert. She was accompanied at the piano by Geoffrey Parsons.

The second collection presented two such CDs. The first presented Kirstein Flagstad performing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Most of the recital was devoted to selections from several of the collections of songs composed by Edvard Grieg. These were followed by four of the five “Wesendonck” songs by Richard Wagner and the “Liebestod” aria that concludes that composer’s opera Tristan und Isolde. The other CD covers a broad repertoire of art song performed by soprano Victoria de los Ángeles, accompanied at the piano by Gerald Moore.

The latest collection is again limited to a single CD. That CD accounts for three different recitals performed by two different vocalists. The first of the vocalists is soprano Sena Jurinac, performing Richard Strauss with Sargent and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall on September 11, 1961. This is followed by two performances by mezzo Christa Ludwig. The first was at the Royal Festival Hall, where she performed a song cycle by Gustav Mahler with André Cluytens conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra on December 2, 1957. For the remainder of the album, she is accompanied at the piano by Geoffrey Parsons in a recital given at Wigmore Hall on July 15, 1978. The composers for her selections were Mahler, Strauss, and Johannes Brahms.

For those that have been following this site for some time, Ludwig’s name is likely to be the more familiar. When I was writing about the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) box set, Karl Böhm: The Operas, I made it a point to bring attention to Ludwig’s performance of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 53, known as the “Alto Rhapsody” (even though it is not an opera). She also delivered a particularly intense account of The Marschallin (Princess Marie Thérèse von Werdenberg) in the second of the two recordings of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier in that same collection. Jurinac also had a “Rosenkavalier connection.” When I was riding out the pandemic by writing about YouTube videos of opera and ballet, I made it a point to examine the Rosenkavalier video of a performance at the 1962 Salzburg Festival at which Jurinac sang the mezzo role of the “title character,” the Count Rofrano better known by the name Octavian.

Where the new CD is concerned, I was particularly struck by the complementing of the two orchestral offerings. The album begins with Jurinac singing Strauss’ Four Last Songs, completed within a year of the composer’s death. This was followed by one of Mahler’s earliest compositions, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (songs of a wayfarer) cycle sung by Ludwig. Taken as a whole, the CD serves as a framework in which the “Strauss-Mahler axis” is expanded to include Brahms in the remaining tracks of art song. The performances may have been separated by years, but their conjunction on this album makes for a compelling unity.