BBC music  CD-review / September 2004

ZEMLINSKY

Lieder

Hermine Haselböck (mezzo-soprano)

Florian Henschel (piano)

Pan PC 10 162 52:53 mins … £££

The Austrian mezzo soprano Hermine Haselböck is something of a specialist in song from the turn of the 20th century; and her new Zemlinsky recital resonates with her admiration and fascination for Schoenberg's teacher at all stages in his songwriting career.

The gravitas within Haselböck's mezzo is sympathetic to the solemn reverence for Brahms which tints seven of Zemlinsky's earliest songs (grouped together from the important volume published in 1995 by Antony Beaumont). And where Zemlinsky dares to follow in Schumann's footsteps, setting Eichendorff’s 'Waldgespräch', she responds sensitively to a setting as enraptured as Schumann's, though lacking both his subtlety of inflection and harmonic nuance.

Five years later, in the Five Songs from 1895-6, Zemlinsky's response to prosody was both more sophisticated and more adventurous; Florian Henschel clearly enjoys their more challenging relationship between the voice and the piano. He comes into his own, though, in the six Maeterlinck settings which are Zemlinsky's masterpiece in song. And here, too, the breadth of Haselböck's imagination and immaculately integrated vocal registers are revealed in the Symbolist poet's strange, dislocated moments of experience.

Six delightful Tuscan Waltz Songs, and two cabaret songs are added for good measure in this shapely and particularly satisfying recital.

Hilary Finch

PERFORMANCE              ****

SOUND                        ****

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