Classical album of the week - Hindemith: Das Marienleben review

The Guardian 100

Juliane Banse/Martin Helmchen
(Alpha)

The great German song cycles of the first half of the 20th century can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Hindemith’s Das Marienleben certainly belongs among them, alongside Mahler’s Kindertoten- and Rückert-Lieder, Schoenberg’s Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, and Hanns Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook. Yet Marienleben is probably the least often performed of all of them. Performances of these settings of the 15 poems of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1913 sequence about the life of Mary, the mother of Christ, are few and far between, though the cycle has always had its champions, one of the most famous of whom was the pianist Glenn Gould, who claimed Marienleben was the greatest of all song cycles, and recorded it in 1978, with the soprano Roxolana Roslak.

Like Roslak and Gould, Juliane Banse and Martin Helmchen opt for the original version of the cycle, which Hindemith completed in 1923, rather than his extensive revision that eventually appeared 25 years later. It had been composed at a fascinating turning point in Hindemith’s composing career, when he was shifting from the sometimes deliberately provocative expressionism of his early works, towards the style of Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity), that would more or less typify his music for the rest of his life.