Hannigan/Reinbert de Leeuw - Vienna - Fin de Siècle

The Guardian 80

Barbara Hannigan/Reinbert de Leeuw
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Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw follow their 2016 disc of Satie with another collection of songs from the turn of the 20th century that represent the beginnings of a very different strand of modernism. The earliest settings in their Viennese selection, Hugo Wolf’s four Mignon-Lieder of 1888, provide an unexpected coda, which otherwise ranges chronologically from a selection of Alexander Zemlinsky’s Op 2, 5 and 7, all composed in the 1890s, to a group of Alma Mahler’s songs from 1915.

All three members of the Second Viennese School are represented, too. Schoenberg’s Four Songs Op 2, three to texts by Richard Dehmel, the fourth to a poem by Johannes Schlaf, were already pushing towards the edges of what was regarded as respectable harmony in 1899, while Webern’s five Dehmel settings straddle the beginning of his studies with Schoenberg in 1908, and preceded his official Op 1, the Passacaglia for orchestra. Berg had also written masses of songs, more than 70 of them before beginning his composition studies, but Hannigan and De Leeuw confine themselves to the well-known group that the composer later selected and published as his Seven Early Songs.

Hannigan’s voice wraps itself lovingly around these vocal lines, savouring every chromatic morsel

Related: Barbara Hannigan/Satie: Socrate CD review – artful, intimate confessionals