Walter Braunfels lived through the catastrophes of two world wars in Europe, and composed in a period when so many of the certainties that had sustained music for the previous two centuries had eroded. But his own works rarely show any sign of those upheavals. Right up to his death in 1954, Braunfels’ music remained rooted in late Romanticism, even though his take on the 19th century was always an entirely personal one.
There’s very little stylistic distance between the earliest of the five song-cycles for soprano and orchestra here – the Three Chinese Songs of 1914, settings of translations by Hans Bethge from the same collection that Mahler had quarried a few years earlier for Das Lied von der Erde – and the last – the Four Japanese Songs from 1945, again to Bethge texts. The later works don’t have the lyrical freshness of the Chinese Songs, which Camilla Nylund’s wonderfully refined performance reveals as a neglected treasure. Nylund also sings the five Romantic Songs – settings of Brentano and Eichendorff which Braunfels began during the first world war and completed during the second.
Ricarda Merbeth is the less striking soloist in the Japanese Songs and the Shakespearean Death of Cleopatra – more an extended song than a scena – while Genia Kühmeier gets the rather enigmatic Die Gott minnende Seele, settings of mystical poems by Mechthild von Magdeburg in which Braunfels pares his language down to its expressive core.
