Katherine Broderick, Malcolm Martineau - Richard Strauss: Lieder for the Turn of a Century (2012)

Soprano Katherine Broderick makes her debut recording on Champs Hill Records with a recital disc of Strauss, Berg and Schoenberg, accompanied by malcolm Martineau.

Katherine Broderick was the winner of the 2007 Kathleen Ferrier Award. Following studies at the National Opera Studio in London, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Mendelssohn in Leipzig, she is now a member of the ENO Young Singers Program. In demand at opera houses in the UK and Europe, her stage repertoire encompasses Wagner, Verdi, Mozart and Britten.

This season she performs at a Wigmore Hall lunchtime recital on 10 November as part of their day and Mendelssohn is a soloist with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra on 24 November.

The repertoire on ’Open Your Eyes’ was all composed between 1885 and 1908 and opens with Eight poems by Herman Gilm’s from his last leaves Which Richard Strauss set in 1885 while still in his very early twenties. The set includes three of his best:loved songs (ie recorded by Felicity Lott on CHR CD037) including the night where he shows his flair for nocturnal tone painting and All Souls’ or ’All Souls Day’ where the most lyrical of vocal lines is set against the background of flower:decked graves.

Alban Berg composed his ’Seven Early Songs’ starting in 1905, while a student of Schoenberg, with the songs influenced by Strauss, Mahler, Wolf and Debussy and have a distinct sense of a romantic musical world expanded beyond its limits, on the brink of dissolving into modernism.

Arnold Schoenberg’s Brettl Lieder Cabaret songs or Cabaret Songs of 1901 are tonal works, Intended to use a more popular song idiom to convey more ’serious’ ideas, and setting eight poems taken from a collection published as simply "German Songs’ in 1900 by Otto Julius Bierbaum . The most unusual of the set is Hugo Salus’ The Genügsamerliebhaber or ’Easily satisfied lover’: a man tells us that his lady:friend has a black cat with a soft, velvety coat. The woman spends all her time caressing her cat’s fur while it sits on her lap, and it shivers when he strokes it. Later, he puts the kitty on his bald head and she plays with it and laughs. Throughout the songs, Schoenberg’s responds to the conjugation with simplicity and humor, and no little suggestiveness in this instance.