The Songs of Brahms, Vol. 8 (2019)

Harriet Burns Sings Brahms

In Harriet Burns' singing, Graham Johnson's pianism and liner notes, and especially in Brahms' music, this CD is a treasure. Soprano Harriet Burns has a beautiful voice for the intimacy of art song. This CD of Brahms, recorded in October 2018, was her debut. It is volume eight in a series of ten presenting the complete songs for voice and piano of Brahms, following-up earlier complete sets of the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Faure, and Strauss. Each of the ten Brahms CDs features a different singer, which gives the listener the opportunity to hear some of the best singers of art song of our day. Harriet Burns is fully part of this esteemed company of lieder singers. The scholar-pianist Graham Johnson collaborates beautifully with Burns and also wrote the book length liner notes characteristic of the series. The notes include texts and translations together with detailed discussion of each song. The notes do not substitute for listening but instead enhance appreciation of the songs and of Brahms.

This CD is part of a set, but it is also a stand-alone. It offers its own journey through the art songs of Brahms arranged in a rough chronological order and loosely grouped to form a theme. In this volume, many of the songs feature a woman's loneliness in the search for love. Many of the songs also have a source in folk music, as Brahms understood it. Early in his liner notes, Johnson suggests as a theme of this recording of Brahms, "loneliness and abandonment" with some songs also featuring "a short redemptive postlude."

In his larger works, Brahms often hid his feelings. His songs are not as well-known as his symphonies, concertos, or chamber music but they are intimate. Brahms' feelings about love, women, sexuality and loneliness come through in his songs as in no other part of his output. Again, Johnson writes in his liner notes: "[i]t may well be that the twenty-year old Brahms was already embarking on the pathway whereby his lieder would become a kind of diary: it was often the content of the poems, rather than the distinction of their authors, that governed his choice of texts. Like most ordinary people he was capable of being touched by poems because they seemed to give voice to his own emotional quandries."

This collection features 19 Brahms songs with opus numbers. It begins with two songs from opus 6, followed be the complete six songs of opus seven, which generally establish the theme for the CD. The eleven remaining songs range from opus 14 through opus 97. The songs are mostly short, restrained, and sad in the voice of frustrated love. I found listening to the music a good companion for solitude. Among the many songs I loved were the "Spanish Song" from opus 6, to a text by Paul Heyse, "True Love" from opus 7, setting a poem by Eduard Schultz, "Agnes", from opus 59, which sets a poem by Eduard Morike set by many other composers, "Spring Song, from opus 85 to a poem by Emanuel von Geibel, and "Separation" from opus 96, to a traditional text.

The CD also includes seven songs from Brahms' collection "German Folksongs" published late in his life without an opus number. These are endearing songs in which Brahms embellished themes that he took, frequently mistakenly, to have their sources in folk tunes. The songs are still lovely. The tenor Robin Tritschler participates in four of the seven songs. For me the highlight of this group of folk song settings was Burns singing the final work, "In silent night, at first watch."

This CD, either alone or with is companions, is a wonderful way to explore and to respond to the songs of Brahms.

Total Time: 63:03

Robin Friedman