Aribert Reimann

Three cycles that show Aribert Reimann at work in the genre closest to him, the song with piano. Each was written with a particular singer in mind: the Kinderlieder of 1961, the Neun Sonette der Louize Labé of 1986 and Nacht-Räume of 1988, for piano four hands and soprano voice. Christine Schäfer and Liat Himmelheber sing, with Axel Bauni at the piano and Reimann himself joining him in Nacht-Räume.

Aribert Reimann was born in Berlin on 4 March 1936 and died there in March 2024. A composition pupil of Boris Blacher, he was a composer and pianist known for his literary operas, Lear first among them, and for decades as a lieder accompanist, notably of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He taught contemporary song in Hamburg from 1974 and in Berlin from 1983, and received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2011 for his life's work. The voice of the intended singer always shaped his song cycles. This disc was recorded on 29-31 May 1989.

The Kinderlieder for soprano and piano set eight short poems by Werner Reinert, from "Wo ist der Vater" to the closing "Schlaf' Kind"; most last under a minute. The Neun Sonette der Louize Labé for mezzo-soprano and piano set the sixteenth-century French poet in her own Old French, from "O beaus yeus bruns" to "Baise m'encor, rebaise moy et baise". At over 36 minutes the cycle is the centre of the disc. Nacht-Räume is unusual in scoring: piano four hands, with the soprano voice entering late. It lasts fourteen minutes in one movement. As Dan Albertson wrote in La Folia in 2015, it is mostly not a vocal composition at all. The first two-thirds are given to the two pianists, often near the extremes of the keyboard. Then the voice enters without words, in stretched melismas, and only at the end sings the Rilke line "Sieh hinauf. Heut ist der Nachtraum heiter".

The disc spans almost thirty years of Reimann's writing for voice, from a young composer's settings of a contemporary poet to two works of the late 1980s. In the four-hand Nacht-Räume the composer took one of the two piano parts himself, so the disc also documents Reimann the pianist, the role in which he had worked with singers for decades. Christine Schäfer was the first to sing Nacht-Räume, and this is its first recording.

CD, Wergo WER 60183-50, released in 1989, in the series Aribert Reimann at Wergo. Total time 61'05.