This year’s centenary of Max Reger’s death isn’t getting much attention on disc or in the concert hall, but Sophie Bevan and Malcolm Martineau’s collection of his songs is a timely gesture. In keeping with his vast output in almost every conceivable orchestral and instrumental genre, Reger was a prolific song composer, too.
Bevan and Martineau had a choice of more than 300 settings, from which they have selected 33, presented chronologically. Typically for Reger, the sequence takes in a range of styles – from folksong and early music arrangements, through lieder echoing Brahms and Hugo Wolf, to a few numbers infiltrated by the chromaticisms of Reger’s late works.
The small print on the disc shows that the songs were recorded in sessions almost two years apart, in 2013 and 2015, and that could partly account for the unevenness of the performances. Martineau is consistently immaculate as an accompanist. Bevan’s soprano shows its familiar silvery-smooth purity in some of the songs, but there are some bumpy moments, and sometimes she seems to be taken into territory that would be more comfortably occupied by voices with a bit more dramatic power than hers.
