Continuing the New Release Count with Wolf

Cover of the final Stone Records album of the songs of Hugo Wolf (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

On the day before Christmas Eve, Stone Records provided me with a longed-for Christmas present. The last of the eleven volumes (each consisting of a single CD) in its project to record all of the songs of Hugo Wolf was finally released. When I announced this, only Presto Music had created a Web page for processing pre-orders; however, there is now also an Amazon.com Web page for pre-orders. This volume, coupled with the tenth, accounts for all 51 of the songs in the Goethe-Lieder collection.

Now that the package is complete, I have to say that I am impressed with how pianist Sholto Kynoch, the one musician responsible for all of the tracks in the collection, has framed the presentation of the content. The two Goethe volumes complement the one collection that is larger, the 53 songs in the Mörike-Lieder. Those were presented in the first two volumes that Stone released. In other words we have four CDs accounting for two major “pillars,” with the rest of Wolf’s songs situated between those two pairs.

Presumably, Kynoch recruited the generous number of vocalists that contributed to this project. I shall not enumerate all of them, nor do I wish to take a “deep dive” into either this final release or the entirety of the Goethe-Lieder. For the most part, my familiarity with this particular portion of the repertoire owes little to my few encounters with recital performances and much to the Anniversary Edition collection of eight EMI CDs, which first piqued my serious attention to Wolf. The vocalists recruited for the Goethe-Lieder selections were baritones Thomas Allen and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, tenor Ian Bostridge, and soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. Kynoch’s vocalists may not be as well-known as the EMI “heavy hitters;” but all the contributors to the Stone project have prepared just the right dispositional stances for every single song.

As a result, I am entering 2023 equipped for many many hours of engaged listening to adventurous vocal compositions.