Robert Schumann – The Songs 4

Oliver Widmer
Stella Doufexis
Graham Johnson
Stephen Layton

Gramophone Editor’s choice

BBC Music Magazine – Hilary Finch
August 2000

Three unaccompanied choral settings are most sensitively sung by Stephen Layton’s London Schubert Chorale

The Sunday Times
At a time when the multinational labels fill their booklets with gushing hype about the artists, Hyperion's documentation puts all to shame: as in his Schubert Lieder Edition, Johnson supplies a 100-page essay, devoting at least a page to each song. He is erudite, readable and witty. Of Clara Schumann's Liebst du um Schönheit, Johnson writes: "The text implies a female singer (although a certain type of man might urge his girlfriend to love a mermaid out of sheer curiosity)"! This text is from Friedrich Rückert's collection Liebesfrühling (Love's Spring), 12 of which Robert and Clara Schumann published jointly as Opus 37: three settings are by Clara, and she may have had a hand in the three rarely heard duets. They are sung sensitively by Doufexis and Widmer, stylish lieder interpreters with fresh young voices, in this fascinating programme based around 18 settings of Rückert.

Gramophone
Excellent performances and recording offer superb advocacy of late songs by Schumann and, even more affecting, by Clara ... This, the fourth offering of Hyperion Schumann, deserves to be celebrated on various counts: its expert programme-making, the extreme sensitivity of its performers (all three soloists and the London Schubert Chorale), and its advocacy of both late Schumann and of Clara, whose direct simplicity of utterance is so affecting

Classic FM Magazine
Schumann lovers are more in debt than ever to Hyperion

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