A Mahler Complete Songs Elise Caluwaerts (soprano), Marianna Shirinyan (piano) Fuga Libera FUG796 65:10 mins
Alma Mahler was a prolific composer of songs and chamber works from her teens until the moment she married Gustav. In an infamous 20-page letter, he insisted Alma gave up composing as a precondition of their getting married. He later recanted, her affair with Walter Gropius the urgent prompt. Fourteen songs were published in her lifetime, with a further three discovered since, from at least 46 named songs and some 30-odd more untitled that she wrote in her early life.
Opening with the Fünf Lieder, edited by Gustav and the first of Alma’s works to be published in 1910, soprano Elise Caluwaerts and pianist Marianna Shirinyan’s dedication to reviving the spirit of Alma extends to using a Steinway from 1899, its rich, warm, expansive acoustic distinctive of its era. Yet it is Shirinyan’s expressive playing of it which is the key, exploiting every nuance in the score, never afraid to use its full volume or quiet rapture.
Mahler’s works are like little dramas, melancholy, richly sung, sometimes seeming as if they are too big for the medium – a hint of the Wagnerian. ‘Mein Vaters Garten’ has an aesthetic very firmly of its early 19th-century milieu, and Caluwaerts, always dedicated, polishes the ebb and flow of Mahler’s line. ‘Einsamer Gang’, a work written when she was barely out of her teen years and only recently rediscovered, is recorded for the first time here – anxious, deeply-felt, rich, dramatic. But there are moments where the balance is off between singer and piano, perhaps particularly in those first Fünf Lieder.
Sarah Urwin Jones
