MAHLER: Lieder aus der Jugendzeit (Songs from Youth):
"Ablösung im Sommer" ("Summer Replacement")
Cuckoo has fallen to his death
on a green willow tree.
Cuckoo is dead!
Fallen to his death.
Who then for us this whole summer
will while away the time?
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
Hey! Lady Nightingale must do so!
She sits on a green branch:
the small, delicate Nightingale,
the dear, sweet Nightingale!
She sings and hops, is ever happy,
even when other birds are silent.
We'll wait for Lady Nightingale,
who lives in green hedgerows.
And if the cuckoo is at an end,
then she will start to warble.
-- original text "based on" Des Knaben Wunderhorn but
mostly by Mahler, translation (mostly) by William Mann
Or click here to go to Internet Archive, then press ► to play
Janet Baker, mezzo-soprano; Geoffrey Parsons, piano. Hyperion, recorded in Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, Hampstead, London, Feb. 24-25, 1983
Or click here to go to Internet Archive, then press ► to play
Diana Damrau, soprano; Stephan Matthias Lademann, piano. Telos Music, recorded in Telos Music Studios, Mechernich-Floisdorf, Germany, May or Sept. 2003
Anny Felbermayer, soprano; Viktor Graf, piano. Vanugard, recorded in Vienna, 1952
Judith Raskin, soprano; George Schick, piano. Epic-CBS-Sony, recorded in New York City, June 1965
A NOTE ON THIS WEEK'S MUSIC (AND SOME
CONSIDERATIONS GOING FORWARD)
Happily, Internet Archive seems back to something like normal functioning, meaning that it's once again possible to draw on Sunday Classics clips that reside there. However, this post, as you may recall, was originally conceived to depend on YouTube for music, and so a fair amount of today's music is so sourced, though it's all audio-only.
A number of today's performances already existed in the SC Archive (chez Internet Archive), and I've returned to embedding clips, hoping they'll play normally. But for these selections I've also included links to their Internet Archive pages. And I've included them in a particular form: with the "Webamp" player active. I've done this for another reason. While I.A. was grounded, the team was also working on a new version of its player, which is what 's used to play the clips that are embedded here. So that even after access to the archive was restored, for a while it was necessary, even if you were listening on-site, to switch to the Webamp option in order to hear anything.
At some point the new player must have been activated, but it appears that, understandably, it wasn't designed to work on old, no-longer-supported browser versions. So anyone who's dependent on such browsers isn't going to be hearing much music. If there are any SC readers in that situation, I'd love to know about it, because this means that all those years' worth of posts are going to be music-less for you. K can at least continue going forward to provide on-site links.
by Ken
In last week's post ("Not that it takes much, but I'm in an 'Urlicht' frame of mind -- and we're going to have some other Mahler Wunderhorn songs too," Oct. 28) we listened to a pair of Mahler's great song hits, "
Urlicht" and "Father Anthony's Fish Sermon," both settings of texts drawn from the folk-song anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn" ("The Youth's Magic Horn") -- and a little wisp of a third, less consequential Wunderhorn song: the song we've just heard again in an almost confounding range of renderings, "Ablösung im Sommer." It's one of Mahler's early Wunderhorn settings, which he felt no need (or reason) to orchestrate himself, though we've already heard it with orchestra (and we have in store performances with orchestratations by several different hands).
IT'S A CHARMING, PERHAPS GOOFY
OR MAYBE EVEN WEIRD LITTLE SONG
