By JD88992
11-Sep-2011

Down a pleasant by-way  

One of the great things about our age of digital music is that you can so easily be exposed to works by composers you might otherwise have missed. Herzogenberg wasn’t even a name to me when I acquired this disc, but I enjoyed a lot of it. He was a contemporary and an admirer of Johannes Brahms and, like him, wrote a quantity of pieces for smaller singing groups-—here three and four-part women’s chorus and solo quartet.

The choral performance could hardly be better suited to the music: the singers never try to make more of it than it is. The same is not true, to my ear, of the solo stuff; I would like a better blend, less dominated by the soprano. Markus Utz directs the vocal forces, with excellent keyboard support from Gotz Payer. Only two of the sets of songs are given complete; the others are excerpted. (I don’t know why the other material was not recorded—there’s plenty of room on the disc—but if this is volume one, there’s clearly more to follow.) Full texts and translations, program notes.
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