Ensemble Pygmalion - Schubert, Schumann, Brahms & Wagner: Rheinmädchen (2016) Hi-Res

Rheinmädchen is a collection of works and scenes for female choir by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wagner. Raphaël Pichon leads the Ensemble Pygmalion and internationally acclaimed mezzo:soprano Bernarda Fink through a program that is guaranteed to delight any fan of vocal music.

The story might start like this: ‘In the beginning there were three sisters guarding the golden ring of their father, the Rhine . . .’ Where and when did it originate, the legend of the Rhinemaidens, these water sprites who are sometimes nymphs, sometimes sirens? Once upon a time. And a very long time ago. As far back in time as the Germanic legends themselves, most likely.

These Rhinemaidens, this gold hidden at the bottom of the river, the ring of power stolen by a dwarf, a ring on which the fate of the earth depends . . . all of this sounds strangely familiar to our contemporary imaginations formed by the works of the great J. R. R. Tolkien. Yet all these stories were more familiar still in nineteenth:century Germany, where the fascination with ancestral legends and foundation myths enjoyed an unprecedented revival of popular and artistic interest. Two centuries after the Thirty Years War, which had led a whole famished and terri ed people to take refuge in the vast forests of Germany, the need for legends and mythical gures (just think of Goethe’s Erlkönig) was still as pressing as ever. Although posterity has selected Richard Wagner as the towering gurehead of the transposition of German myths into art, the reality is quite different. There were many composers who drank at the well of tradition. And Johannes Brahms, whom music history has always so rmly set at loggerheads with Wagner, was quite as much the worthy descendant of the Rhinemaidens as was the master of Bayreuth. In addition to their choice of poetry, one need only instance the abundant use both men made of the horn and the harp, so redolent of warlike, masculine images and of feminine, aquatic and poetic spheres respectively. …

Ensemble Pygmalion
Bernarda Fink, mezzo:soprano
Emmanuel Ceysson, harp
Raphaël Pichon, direction