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Fruhe Lieder on CD

In addition to orchestral works and chamber music, the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck devoted himself mainly to vocal music. Besides eight operas, he composed more than 400 songs in which, in contrast to Reger or Strauss, for example, he set to music the important German lyric poets such as Goethe, Eichendorff, Heine, Uhland, Mörike or Hesse, striking his own characteristic note for each. At first he composed individual songs, which he put together into groups of works depending on the poet, vocal register or period of origin; he later created extensive song cycles with piano, instrumental and orchestral accompaniment. Schoeck composed songs all his life and is rightly regarded as one of the most important song composers of the 20th century. For him, for whom poetry was living reality, the message of a poem had to correspond with his own attitude to life and world view in order to achieve a harmony between poetry and music. His compositional radius ranges from the simple folksong-like melody ("Die Kapelle" op. 3/2) to the chromatically exuberant eruption ("Rastlose Liebe" op. 19a/5), without ever losing touch with tonality. The songs recorded on this release span the period from the first attempts of a precocious youth ("Nachtgesang" oO No. 2, 1900) to the mature Eichendorff songs op. 30 of 1918, some of them in world premiere recordings. In Eichendorff's Wanderlied op. 12/2, the two bass baritones Benedikt Boll and André Sesgör from Clemens Morgenthaler's singing class at the Feldkirch University of Music are featured as the "Prague students".