Gustav Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Gustav Mahler's songs from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" are probably among the most profound ever written for voice. Katharina Kammerloher and Arttu Kataja explore the depths and shallows of this music, accompanied by Eric Schneider, who brings drama and expression to the ridiculously difficult piano part with drama and expression. Mahler deliberately chose the folk-song-like collection of the Romantics Chamisso and von Arnim. The songs are so directly moving, they deal with love and loss, misery and existential distress - and repeatedly with war and death. The humor is often pitch-black, usually sarcastic and sometimes even delightfully grimacing and contorted. However, the most striking pieces are those that seem quite simple on the surface, "Revelge" for example, "Das irdische Leben" or the endless march of "Tamboursg'sell" "Tamboursg'sell". The intensity of these pieces creeps under your skin, not least because Kammerloher and Kataja make the dramatic outbursts sound unaffected and truthful. The two singers from the Berlin State Opera act with vocal power and striking presence, tongue-in-cheek where necessary ("Lob des hohen Verstandes" or "Des Antonio von Padua Fischpredigt") and deceptively simple as in the closing "Urlicht", which would later become a central part of the 2nd Symphony. All in all: a panorama of human existence that Mahler must have been enormously fascinated by and that should leave no one cold, neither then nor now, or especially not now.