A New Aparté Album of Liszt Orchestral Songs

One week from today Aparté will release an an album of orchestral songs by Franz Liszt. The eleven tracks account for two different categories. Six of the tracks are composed by Liszt himself. The other five present orchestrations of songs by Franz Schubert. The orchestral accompaniment is provided by the Orchester Wiener Akademie conducted by Martin Haselböck. As is often the case, the album is available for pre-order; but the site may strike some as unlikely. It is a Bandcamp Web page on which the prices are given in euros! [added 4/21, 4:20 p.m.: Amazon has now created a Web page with the price given in dollars!]

Thomas Hampson on the cover of his new Liszt album, flanked on both sides by the other vocalists and the conductor (courtesy of PIAS)

The leading vocalist on the album is baritone Thomas Hampson, who performs on six of the tracks. Three of the tracks are performed by soprano Sunhae Im; and the remaining two tracks are sung by mezzo Stephanie Houtzeel and baritone Tomasz Konieczny, respectively. Konieczny’s track is the last on the album, a performance of Liszt’s “Der Titan;” and he is joined by the Chorus Viennensis. That track is one of five receiving world premiere performances.

Readers may recall that I have been following the Hyperion releases of pianist Julius Drake’s project to record the complete Liszt songs for voice and piano. The sixth volume was released at the end of January of 2020. According to my calculations, one disc remains; but the production of that album was probably impeded by the COVID pandemic.

Given the flamboyant rhetoric that one encounters in Liszt’s own compositions for piano and/or orchestra, there is a surprising intimacy in his approaches to art song. One can appreciate that intimacy throughout all the tracks on this orchestral album. Liszt even takes a relatively restrained approach to his orchestration of Schubert’s D. 328 “Der Erlkönig,” making sure that the baritone would not have to compete with the decidedly rich instrumental resources. Mind you, the arrangement still comes to an intense climax; and Hampson clearly throws a bit of his own fuel into the fire. Nevertheless, the overall performance is well-enough balanced that the intensity of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s text is never overwhelmed.

I suspect that the familiarity I have cultivated with Liszt’s songs for voice and piano prepared me for his orchestral technique applied to both his own music and Schubert’s; and I anticipate that, in future listening, I shall balance my attention without favoring either of those two genres.