As all veteran serenaders know, the enterprise comes with no guarantee of success

Serenade by Judith Leyster (1609-1660), in the Rijksmuseum

Let's see how these randomly chosen serenaders make out --
and how they handle, er, lack of response (oops, spoiler!)

Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; with women of the Bavarian State Opera Chorus, Munich; Erik Werba, piano. EMI, recorded in the Bürgerbräu, Munich, June 18-20, 1973

Sarah Walker, mezzo-soprano; with male vocal ensemble (6 tenors, 5 baritones and basses); Graham Johnson, piano. From Vol. 8 of the Hyperion Schubert Edition, recorded May 29-31, 1989

Peter Schreier, tenor; András Schiff, piano. Decca, recorded in the Mozartsaal of the Vienna Konzerthaus, August 1989

Håkan Hagegård, baritone; Emanuel Ax, piano. RCA, recorded in RCA Studio A, New York City, Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 1984

Matthias Goerne, baritone; Alfred Brendel, piano. Decca, recorded live in Wigmore Hall, Nov. 5 & 7, 2003

by Ken

To recapitulate: We have slid through a wormhole into the world of Schubert's serenades. We came by way of matters larkish -- originally my fondly remembered old trio of larks: Haydn's Lark Quartet (Op. 64, No. 5), Nicolai's setting of Shakespeare's "Hark, hark, the lark" in Act II of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Vaughan Williams's "rhapsody for violin and orchstra The Lark Ascending. (The relevant posts are "Just so you know what we're up to: Three familiar larks, a bonus lark, and (oh yes!) Death and a maiden," Oct. 16, and "If we're musical-lark-harking, we really need to count the number of: (1) 'hark's and (2) stanzas ['finally' (?) updated version]," Nov. 21.


THEN I REMEMBERED THAT SCHUBERT
TOO HAD SET "HARK, HARK, THE LARK"

From the Loose Ends Dept.:Yet another Schubert serenade

TEMPORARY POST, I think (so that, with this chunk of music "ready," I can hear it in this form -- and I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to too)

FRIDAY UPDATE: We've added a performance each for D. 920 and D. 921 -- featuring big-time talent: Janet Baker and Christa Ludwig

Brigitte Fassbaender (born 1939): Listen to either of her performances of the serenade "Zögernd leise" (she recorded both of Schubert's versions) and see if you don't feel you've been in the presence of a great singer.

❡

What we'll be doing, as best I can scope it out at present, is rehearing "the" Schubert Serenade, "Leise flehen" (you know, the one from the song collection Schubert had done so much work on without putting it in final form, published posthumously as Schwanengesang, or "Swan Song"; maybe in some performances we haven't heard?) and "the other" Schubert Serenade (the "Hark, hark, the lark" setting that got us into this whole territory) along with this utterly captivating "newcomer," of which we have these four quite different but pretty wonderful peformances (just note, in the piano introd, as dramatic and grabbing as it is brief, how differently our four pianists hear it, setting such interestingly different tones for the performances to come), and we may want to fill some of the gaps we've left from these staggeringly productive last couple of years of Schubert's life.

Example: The earliest of the three serenades, "Horch, horch, die Lerch' im Ätheblau," D. 889, was written days after he finished what would be his last string quartet, No. 15 in G major, D. 887 (though the sublime String Quintet was still to come), and especially considering the overpowering need Schubert felt near the very end -- as Graham Johnson laid it out for us -- to hear Beethoven's Op. 131 Quartet (which friends managed to arrange for him to hear, and we heard it too), which tells us so much about where his head was musically at this point, I'm thinking maybe we should hear not just the G major Quartet but its predecessor, No. 14, the Death and the Maiden Quartet (an imposing work in its own right, but still a leap behind the G major), and the String Quintet as well. Meanwhile . . . . -- Ken

SCHUBERT: Ständchen, "Zögernd leise, in des Dunkels nächt'ger Stille" ("Lingering quietly, in the dark's nighttime stillness"), 1st and 2nd versions, D. 920 and 921

This jolly Brahms duet really isn't part of our "work unit," but we kind of have to hear it about now

Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; Peter Schreier, tenor; Karl Engel, piano. DG, recorded in Studio Lankwitz, Berlin, June 1982
Iris Vermillion, mezzo-soprano; Christoph Prégardien, tenor; Helmut Deutsch, piano. CPO, from Brahms Complete Duets & Quartets, recorded in the Kleiner Sendesaal of RBB (Berlin-Brandenburg Radio), Berlin-Charlottenburg, 1997-2003, released 2017


AND WE HAVE TO HEAR IT BECAUSE --

Of course it was possible for the young Brahms to be aware of Chopin's scherzos and ballades without in any way imitating them

[With assorted strategic Monday-morning touching up]

Plus, we get to have some fun with Weber's Oberon Overture
and Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music (than
which musical wonderfulness doesn't come any wonderfuller)

Given Brahms's reverance for the great masters who preceded him, and in particular one who had revolutionized the way composers could think about the piano, how could he not have been keenly aware of Chopin?

"Johannes Brahms began his musical life studying the piano, and his earliest, truly great compositions were solo piano works, both presented here. The Scherzo in E-flat minor, Op. 4, is the earliest surviving composition by Brahms. He wrote it in November 1851 when he was 18 and published it as Op. 4, rather than Op. 1, because, he explained to a friend, “when one shows one's self for the first time, people must first see the head and not the feet.” Musical scholars feel that, despite the composer’s denial, it obviously shows a “dependence” on Chopin’s scherzi, and quotes from Heinrich Marschner’s Hans Heiling at bar 46 as well."

-- from an online note accompanying a listing for Yefim Bronfman's early recording of Op. 4 (the Scherzo) and Op. 5 (the F minor Piano Sonata)

SO, HERE AGAIN IS HOW BRAHMS'S SCHERZO GOES
(in two performances we haven't heard before and one we have)

BRAHMS: Scherzo for Piano in E-flat minor, Op. 4


Yefim Bronfman, piano. MusicMasters, recorded c1986

Julius Katchen, piano. Decca, recorded in Decca Studio No. 3, West Hampstead (London), 1964

Wilhelm Kempff, piano. DG, recorded in the Beethovensaal, Hannover (Germany), March 1958

I'll have something to say about the performances farther down. For now, I suggest keeping in mind the ages of the pianists at the time of recording -- roughly 28, 38, and 62. Turns out, it seems to matter.

by Ken

In a moment we're going to hear how a Chopin scherzo goes. But first let me say that it's been a good week for me, musically and in other ways as well, I guess. (Funny how the two often go together!) After a couple of years in which it was all but impossible for me to listen to music on my aging computer, which I imagined was suffering from some likely fatal hardware or at least heart-stoppingly expensive malady whose repair would likely cost almost as much as replacing the poor old computer, well --

Long story short (I actually started writing the whole story before just chucking it, since what interest could it have for anybody but me?), like magic I managed to solve all the problems, and then some, and suddenly I found myself with wonderful music pouring forth from both my computers. It used to be that even when I was most depressed about the purposelessness of these posts, the music revived me. So lately I've been allowing myself to wallow a bit in the pleasure of all this music, and later in this post we're going to allow it ourselves the luxury of some pleasurable musical wallowing.


NOW HERE'S HOW A CHOPIN SCHERZO GOES
(via a Czech, a Hungarian, and of course the Pole -- thrice over!)

Now we hear Mahler's heartbreaking "Kindertotenlieder"

Baritone Matthias Goerne sings "Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n" ("Now will the sun rise just as brightly"), the opening song of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, with Jonathan Nott conducting the Mahler Youth Orchestra, at a Proms concert in the Royal Albert Hall, Sept. 4, 2009.

Now will the sun rise just as brightly
as if no misfortune had happened in the night.
The misfortune happened to me alone;
the sun shines for everyone.

Your must not hoard the night within,
it must be absorbed into the eternal light.
A little lamp in my shelter has gone out;
hail to the joyful light of the world!

-- translation by Lucy E. Cross

by Ken

Aa promised, after focusing on the last of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), "In diesem Wetter" ("In this weather"), with its final stanza minor-to-major "switcheroo," in Friday night's preview, today we hear the whole of this haunting song cycle.

It's worth recalling that at the time Mahler undertook to set this handful of the poems written on the subject by Friedrich Rückert, his own daughters were still healthy, and Alma Mahler was more than a little upset at this challenge to fate. This was likely not ameliorated as their own tragedies struck. A case could be made that she never forgave him.

In the case of other Mahler songs we've listened as well to the original piano-accompanied settings. We're going to skip that in the case of this cycle we're going to skip that step. It would be especially hard to forego Mahler's orchestral setting, which is notably spare and chamberlike -- the chilly, melancholy opening oboe-and-horn duet sets the tone. There's a normal complement of woodwinds, but of brasses there are only horns, a pair in Nos. 1-4 and four in "In diesem Wetter," and there are only dabs of percussion. The harp is a notable presence.