For their latest album, recorded live at the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, Christian Gerhaher and his long-time duo-partner, Gerold Huber, have revisited the songs of the great Romantic composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).  Yet it is not their first time: on their debut album in 2002 you’ll already find the ‘Four Serious Songs’, op.121, and in 2017 they released their version of ‘Romances from L. Tieck’s Magelone’, op.33.  However, with this album, they bring single songs and cycles to the fore that testify to an intense striving by Brahms to create a new ‘folk tune’.  Embedded into social changes of the 19th century, Brahms here tries to establish the art song as a reflection of its own imagined history as well as a reminiscence and portrayal of a naturalness gradually becoming lost during the rise of the modern world – similar to the ambivalence between tradition and progress, noticeable in his instrumental works.

As always, thanks to their ideal interweaving of words and music, Gerhaher and Huber introduce a new perspective to these songs.  Among the works recorded here, apart from the exemplary cycle of the Neun Lieder und Gesänge, op.32, and the ‘Regenlied’ cycle of posthumously published poems by Klaus Groth (which are heard here in their rarely performed early version) you will find well-known pieces such as ‘Sehnsucht’ and ‘Von ewiger Liebe’.

The highly informative booklet note was written by Laurenz Lütteken, one of the leading musicologists of our time.