TIDES OF LIFE

Barber: Dover Beach;

Brahms: Vier ernste Gesänge; Schubert: An die Leier; Memnon; Geheimes; Ständchen* (arr. Bob Zimmerman); Wolf: Mörikelieder – selection; Goethe-lieder – selection; Italian Serenade Candida Thompson (violin), Thomas Hampson (baritone); *Netherlands Female Youth Choir; Amsterdam Sinfonietta/wilma ten Wolde

Channel Classics CCS 38917 55:10 mins

Thomas Hampson’s honeyed baritone and leonine good looks have delighted audiences for decades. A passionate advocate for art song, his latest foray into the studio showcases songs by Schubert, Wolf and Brahms in new arrangements for string orchestra, almost all by the British composer David Matthews, alongside Barber’s Dover Beach and Wolf’s joyous Italian Serenade. This continues a tradition of orchestral song established by figures like Berlioz, Brahms (who himself orchestrated Schubert) and others. Here, 19th-century drawingroom songs are refracted through a 20th-century Mahlerian soundworld, and placed firmly in the 21st-century concert hall.

In his orchestrations Matthews makes inspired and sensitive use of string colour and intimate solos. The Amsterdam Sinfonietta is sometimes a touch heavy-handed, making me occasionally miss the crisp, percussive attack of a piano. However, in the tumultuous ‘Der Rattenfänger’, incisive and spiky bowing perfectly evoke Wolf ’s mischievousness. Mayrhofer’s uncanny text in