Epic - Lieder & Balladen

The Guardian 100

Degout/Lepper
(Harmonia Mundi)
From Schubert’s murderous dwarf to similarly dark works by Schumann and Brahms, Degout and Lepper provide impeccable drama on a superb album

Here is a disc that lives up to its title. The baritone Stéphane Degout and pianist Simon Lepper give us a stormy sequence of songs and ballads, most of them steeped in the German Romantic tradition, all of them delivered with the dramatic sense of true storytellers.

They start with Schubert’s Der Zwerg, spinning a gothic tale of a murderous dwarf, and then move on through similarly dark-painted numbers by Loewe, Schumann and Brahms to Wolf’s deliciously creepy Der Feuerreiter. Loewe’s setting of Edward – in which a man confesses to his mother that he has killed his father, then curses her for making him do it – seems fiery enough until you hear Brahms’s duet setting of the same poem, which comprehensively eclipses it, especially in such an urgent, edge-of-the-seat performance as this. It’s Felicity Palmer, no less, who sings the mother, and she’s wonderfully vivid; for the next number, Brahms’s Die Nonne und der Ritter, it’s the tender-voiced Marielou Jacquard who sings the melancholy nun.