While on the subject of fine singers, a desirable Audite ‘first release’ features the American baritone Barry McDaniel, whose warm-textured singing and persuasive interpretative manner of various art songs are tellingly illustrated in a programme of works by Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Duparc, Ravel and Debussy. Perspective purchasers need only sample the opening track, Schubert’s sizeable Lied ‘Der Winterabend’, to have their most optimistic suspicions confirmed.

Debussy’s three Promenoir des Deux Amants (Walk of Two Lovers) with Reimann as accompanist joined by Finke, and Zoeller in the Ravel.

The gentleness of his style is evident immediately in the first song of the program, Schubert’s ‘Winterabend’: he captures beautifully the wistfulness of thinking back on “a beautiful time now vanished”. According to the notes, “he always imagined whispering his songs into the ears of a listener in the back row”, and you can hear it in that song. He also sings with commanding authority, as is evident in ‘Auflösung’.

The Wolf songs show him at his best, singing ‘Abschied’ with great abandon. The relationship between love and death suffuses the six songs of Duparc. In ‘Chanson Triste’ he catches the swooning quality of one seeking repose in a lover’s presence and in ‘Lamento’ the apprehension of hearing a dove sing at night in a graveyard. McDaniel conveys movingly the grief that permeates ‘Soupir’ and ‘Extace’, with its Wagnerian chords suggesting the love duet from Tristan und Isolde. He employs a full range of expression in Ravel’s great songs: the exhilaration of love, outrage over colonial exploitation of Madagascar, and the sweetness of natural life. The exoticism of Debussy’s three Promenoir songs finds a fitting exponent in McDaniel. So good is his performance of these French songs that even Gerard Souzay could have taken a lesson from him. This is revelatory singing. Barry McDaniel was healed by music, and was able to bring the healing power of music to others with his gentle, lyric voice.
The Schubert and Schumann songs were recorded in 1963-5; the Wolf, Debussy, and Duparc in 1973-4; and the Ravel in 1966. All were recorded in the same Berlin radio studio, giving consistent and adequate sound, though it is not spacious. Notes give a good biography, based evidently on an interview with him at age 81. Texts but no translations.

Violinist Judith Ingolffson finds great warmth in the lower registers of her 1750 Lorenzo Guadagnini violin for the Sinfonia of Igor Stravinsky’s Divertimento, but she also delivers its jagged rhythmic passages with cocky incisiveness—a brashness that strops a comparably sharp edge on her reading of the second movement (“Danses suisses”). The third provides her, as well as her sympathetic collaborator, pianist Vladimir Stoupel, with an opportunity to blend lyricism with slashing figuration, a challenge they meet with a combination of wit and verve. The last movement (or might it also be Audite’s engineers?) displays the unalloyed silver of her instrument’s upper registers—as well of course, as the purity of her tone production—in its cantabile sections.

The contrast of an almost metallic brightness with shadows, and shadowy dimness streaked only occasionally by light, that the two works offer, of course, allows Ingolfsson to draw upon the correspondingly contrasting sides of her musical personality, her tone production, and the capabilities of her instrument; all three respond to the challenges of Dmitri Shostakovich’s late work. It seems to be a tough sell; even dedicatee David Oistrakh, who recorded the sonata with Sviatoslav Richter (Mobile Fidelity MFCD 909, presumably no longer available), and who set a very high standard, hardly popularized the piece. Ingolffson and Stoupel play with reserved puckishness in the first movement (so did Leila Josefowicz, whose performance with John Novacek on Warner, 2564 62997-2 I very strongly recommended in Fanfare , 30:2, preferring it to the reading by Oistrakh’s own student Lydia Mordkovich on Chandos 8988), and they hack and slash their way aggressively through the second movement’s thickets of irony. Ingolffson sounds particularly commanding as she dispatches the movement’s difficulties, and the engineers have captured the dynamic range of the instruments in the most tumultuous sections. By contrast, they set the pizzicato statement of the final movement’s passacaglia theme and the first variations in a very subdued light, which remains through the movement.

In Fanfare 26:5, I noted that Ilya Grubert’s performance on Channel Classics 16398 lacked, in its last movement, Oistrakh’s “depth of reflection.” I also thought that his reading of the second movement hardly matched “both the last measure of Oistrakh’s fervor and the caustic bite of his pessimism.” Could that be said of Ingolfsson’s reading of the finale as well? However Ingolfsson stands in relation to Oistrakh, however, she demonstrates probing insight into the sonata—as she does into Stravinsky’s pastiche, and her pairing of them deserves a strong recommendation.

As this is the first in the Mandelring Quartet’s complete cycle of Mendelssohn’s string quartets, plain chronological order may well have been the simplest approach and better than saving the insubstantial E flat Quartet for later. However, it’s hard not to feel that a recording of this quality wouldn’t have benefited from a more contextual approach: to place together Opp 12 and 13 is to look at Mendelssohn’s study of Beethoven’s late quartets and therefore be party to one of the most essential parts of Mendelssohn’s relationship with his sister Fanny. So much of that shared interest is evident in his best and final quartet, the ‘Requiem für Fanny’, that the only frustration with this wonderful disc is the knowledge that there will be a considerable wait until they get round to releasing Op 80.

The Mandelrings make an appealingly muscular sound but without the sense of jostling egos one often hears in recordings of quartets by groups this mature. This is particularly noticeable in their even-handed approach to the intricate fugues of the two later quartets and there is, in fact, a strong feeling throughout that this music—Mendelssohn and Beethoven—is in the blood of the players. The accuracy of articulation and tuning add a further dimension of enjoyment to this sense and they always stay on the right side of sentimental, knowing what they mean and meaning what they say with enough confidence to be minimalist in how much they interfere with what Mendelssohn carefully placed on the page. This isn’t to say it’s glib or throwaway—in fact, there is a lot in the authenticness of this performance to suggest that the way they play these pieces is the only way to play them. There is a conviction to the performance that totally banishes any sense that these quartets were the on-paper achievement of a privileged prodigy whose experience lacked the kind of deprivation necessary to create great art. For those who struggle with that notion, this disc will be a welcome emancipation.

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Die Tenor-Partie in Ludwig van Beethovens 9. Symphonie hat Fritz Wunderlich oft im Konzert gesungen, aber nie spezifisch für die Schallplatte aufgenommen. Es gibt jedoch mehrere Live-Mitschnitte, von denen dieser hier klanglich eindeutig der beste ist, auch wenn die nicht besonders inspirierende Interpretation von Dean Dixon, der von 1961 bis 1974 Chefdirigent beim HR war, nicht gerade zu den Glanzpunkten der Beethoven-Kunst zu zählen ist.

Arthur Campbell (not to be confused with clarinetists James Campbell or David Campbell) is professor of clarinet at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The opening sentence of the booklet notes reads, “This program begins a journey through the repertoire for clarinet and piano that Campbell and Marlais explore together each season.” Well and good, if there weren’t dozens of other clarinet recital discs released each year, many of them including much of the repertoire given here.

Do Campbell and his wife, Helen Marlais, bring anything to these pieces that warrants acquisition of yet another clarinet recital CD? In a word, no. Campbell has an attractive enough sound, in a generic way, but his performances are consistently undercharacterized; moreover, there are some technical problems that become troublesome: His trills are too slow, and he has a tendency to blur (dare I say “fudge”?) rapid runs. In the second Schumann piece, he consistently tries to compensate for slow finger technique by starting the most difficult triplet figure too soon, which hardly helps. And, in the Lento of the Saint-Saëns sonata, he overblows the sempre f opening section in the lowest register of the instrument, and his frequent gasps for air become distracting. Stick with David Shifrin, Jonathan Cohler, and the young Anna Hashimoto in this repertoire.

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