Rediscovered Swiss art songs
Three new albums make it clear that there is still much to discover when it comes to piano songs by Swiss composers, whether in dialect or in High German.
With their extraordinary CD Songs of the homeland from 2019, the renowned Lucerne soprano Regula Mühlemann not only showed courage in her choice of repertoire, she also triggered a new trend (Review by Verena Naegele). It is dedicated to the careful selection and revival of partly forgotten works by Swiss composers. Recently, a number of new recordings have appeared that are dedicated to such settings, some of them dialect poems, and thus shed light on the theme of home.
Swiss Love
Franziska Heinzen (soprano) and Benjamin Mead (piano) have created the "New Year's Piece" for the year 2025 at Zurich Central Library. Under the title Swiss Love. The sorrow and lust of love love stories of all shades are presented in a program in which the duo artfully interweaves songs by Lothar Kempter, Johann Carl Eschmann, Yvonne Röthlisberger and Wilhelm Baumgartner, some of them recorded for the first time, with newly arranged folk songs.
Hei cho
The second recording presents under the title Hei cho Settings of poems by Josef Reinhart, a well-known educator and writer from the Solothurn region in the first half of the 20th century. They were composed by Richard Flury, Ernst Honegger, Emil Adolf Hoffmann, Walter Lang, Friedrich Niggli, Heinrich Pestalozzi and Karl Schell. Soprano Stephanie Bühlmann - this is not her first dialect work either - has been able to recruit tenor Daniel Behle and pianist Benjamin Engeli, both proven specialists, for this project.
Forgotten songs, forgotten love
The third CD focuses on the work of Willy Heinz Müller, a violinist, conductor and composer from Vienna, who was active in the St.Gallen area until the 1970s and cultivated an international network of contacts. His songs, however, remained undiscovered for almost 100 years until the soprano Mélanie Adami, his great-granddaughter, finally took the time to study these forgotten works in detail during the coronavirus crisis. Convinced of their quality, she found equally curious fellow musicians in pianist Judith Polgar and baritone Äneas Humm, and together they made the recording entitled Forgotten songs, forgotten love to record. The compositions were complemented by works by other composers who had either made a great impression on Müller or with whom he had a personal relationship, such as Ernst von Dohnányi, Franz Ries or Carl Götze.
The musical level and recording quality is so high on all three recordings that you occasionally forget that you are not listening to standard or even master repertoire. For example, the fact that Daniel Behle is not a dialect speaker is only noticeable at the beginning. Overall, this feature also contributes to a certain ennobling of the overall sound. And even if there are occasional long stretches, the three recordings nevertheless invite listeners on a domestic voyage of discovery that will also reward a wider audience.
Swiss Love. The sorrow and lust of love. Solo Musica SM 477
Hei cho. Dialect songs on poems by Josef Reinhart. Solo Musica SM 464
Forgotten songs, forgotten love. Forgotten Songs by Willy Heinz Müller. Prospero Classical PROSP 0087
