Brahms - Die Schöne Magelone

The Guardian 100

Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber
(Sony)

In the face of stiff competition – including, recently on disc, from Roderick Williams and Roger Vignoles – baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber take on Brahms’s Die Schöne Magelone. Once again they show how it should be done. This work is not so much a song cycle as a collection that happens to derive from the same literary source.

In the concert hall, Gerhaher has linking narrations by German author Martin Walser, and a version including these is available to download; but the main CD release allows each song to flow gloriously on into the next. Huber is wonderfully responsive; as for Gerhaher, he is velvet-toned and confiding, hanging long melodies off deliciously pointed words, and shaping lines that soar upwards then gently descend. His intensity at moments of resolution is striking, but no less so is the pared-back tone he brings to the lullaby that forms the work’s briefly restful centre.