Werner Gura & Christoph Berner - Ludwig Van Beethoven: Lieder & Bagatellen (2015)

This Beethoven release by historical performance specialists Werner Gura (tenor) and Christoph Berner (fortepiano) is novel in several ways and conjures an intimate Romantic-era chamber atmosphere as few other Beethoven song recordings have done. Berner's Streicher fortepiano of 1847 is a marvelous instrument: quiet, but resonant, with a marvelous misty high register in the variation passages of the late Bagatelles, Op. 126. But even better is the concept of the program, which is more or less unprecedented in the recording era, but might well have been quite familiar to an audience in an Austrian household a couple of generations after Beethoven. Gura and Berner offer songs from all the phases of Beethoven's career, from early to on-the-brink-of-late, the latter in the form of the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98 (On the Distant Beloved). This cycle in Gura's highly expressive reading comes across not only as a pioneering song cycle, the first true example of the form, but as an intensely personal document that may have had a lot to do with Beethoven's unmailed letter to his unidentified Immortal Beloved, and as a work that really inaugurates the late period. The Bagatelles are not just interludes in the song program but apotheoses of Beethoven's treatment of small-scale melodic forms. Gura also shines in the early aria Adelaide, Op. 46, and in a group of middle-period songs that are by and large rarely performed. A genuinely fresh Beethoven song recording. -- James Manheim