Mahler In A Light-Hearted Mood

As a devoted lifelong fan of Gustav Mahler, I'll be the first one to admit that you can't usually use the adjective "light-hearted" to describe his music.  Ah, but then I forgot this recording, which I grabbed at random off the shelves and plugged into the car's CD player today.

In his younger years, during the decade of the 1880s, Mahler composed a sizable number of song settings.  For some, he wrote his own poetry (as he did also for the cantata Das Klagende Lied and the finale of the Second "Resurrection" Symphony of 1894).  In other cases he used poetry from the folk-poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn").   The only songs from this period that are at all well-known are the four Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen ("Songs of a Wayfaring Youth").  The remainder were gathered by Mahler and published in several volumes. 
The title under which Mahler published this collection was simply Lieder und Gesänge.  It was a later publisher who added the descriptive "aus der Jugendzeit" (from Youth).

With the exception of the familiar Fahrenden Gesellen cycle, these songs are a good deal lighter and less full of doubts than the later works of the composer.  Some moments of darkness intrude, but on the whole the tone is bright, cheerful, even playful.  And that characteristic is beautifully captured in the recorded performance at hand, featuring the British mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker and her preferred accompanist, Geoffrey Parsons.

Mahler understood full well that the art of composing a Lied, the art of saying a very great deal in a very short space of time, required considerable discipline.  So too does the art of performing Lieder and this team certainly knows how to do it.  The result, paradoxically, is singing and playing of the highest artistry devoted to the purpose of appearing artless and innocent -- a requirement of the texts of some of these songs.

The recital begins with three earlier songs that stand outside the collected volumes.  These are followed by the 13 Lieder und Gesänge, and the record concludes with the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen in a new edition by Colin Matthews which brings the piano/vocal text in line with the orchestral/vocal text (the former piano edition was based on an earlier version of the cycle, probably by mistake).

Dame Janet Baker was renowned for her interpretations of the music of Mahler, and with good reason.  Few singers in my lifetime, apart from Maureen Forrester, have been able to enter so thoroughly into Mahler's unique and unsettling world vision.  These songs give her a chance to display a lighter touch, along with superb comic sense where it's required.  Droll as some of these songs become, there are others that are darker and these too she compasses beautifully.  Parsons is throughout a sympathetic and insightful accompanist.  The 1983 recording still sounds superb.

This marks one of the earliest entries in what has now become the longest-running series of Lieder recordings in history.  Hyperion Records would soon become the issuing company of Graham Johnson's daunting project to record all of the 600-plus Schubert Lieder, with various singers and accompanists taking on songs best suited to their voice type.  The company has continued on with Lieder and song cycles of many other composers, following a similar model.  In the process, Hyperion has become identified with the world of the European art song as thoroughly as Decca or EMI have come to be known as operatic labels.  These recordings -- and this Mahler disc definitely ranking among them -- have come to be regarded as some of the greatest treasures of the era of recorded music.