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Carolyn Sampson – but I like to sing… (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:27 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
After many acclaimed releases on BIS, most recently ‘Sounds and Sweet Airs – A Shakespeare Songbook’ (BIS-2653), Carolyn Sampson’s latest recital with Joseph Middleton lives up to its name: it is an eloquent testimony to the English soprano’s love of her art. This programme artfully blends well-known and lesser-known lieder by German and Austrian masters such as Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf with French songs by Gounod, Poulenc and Franck, as well as works by Anglo-Saxon composers such as Hubert Parry, Samuel Barber and Ivor Gurney. Female composers are not forgotten, with rarely-performed songs by Rita Strohl based on slightly risque poems by Pierre Louys, music by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Kaija Saariaho – who has recently passed away – and Deborah Pritchard, whose song presented here was composed especially for Sampson. And while Leonard Bernstein’s comically cheeky song ‘I hate music’, appears to be a call not to let music take itself too seriously, Errollyn Wallen’s ‘Peace on Earth’, which concludes the album, invokes calm and encourages us to find peace, a message that seems more relevant today than ever.
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Carolyn Sampson – You Did Not Want For Joy (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 50:50 minutes | 927 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deux-Elles Limited
You did not want for joy is Carolyn Sampson and Matthew Wadsworth’s third album together. It is a song recital programme, bookended by old and new settings of the same texts, interspersed with themes of nature, love, and the human condition. It features folk songs and broadside ballads, as well as songs by Dowland, Campion, Purcell and Britten. There is also a new commission by Nico Muhly – the first piece of new music to be written for Sampson and Wadsworth as a duo – a setting of the text from Hildegard von Bingen’s O viridissima virga. Equally at home on the concert and opera stages, soprano Carolyn Sampson has enjoyed notable successes in the UK as well as throughout Europe and the US. In 23/24 Carolyn will make her debut at Berlin Staatsoper as well as releasing what will be her 100th Recording as a featured solo artist. Working in the UK and Europe as a soloist and chamber musician, lutenist Matthew Wadsworth has appeared at most major concert halls and festivals, and can often be heard on radio, both in live performance and recordings. His many CD recordings for Channel Classics, Linn Records, Deux-Elles and Wigmore Live have all received international critical acclaim, and have been featured as Gramophone Editor’s Choice on three occasions.
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Carolyn Sampson, Roderick Williams, Joseph Middleton – Sounds and Sweet Airs – A Shakespeare Songbook (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:24:53 minutes | 2,59 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
The 37 songs in this recital, written by 27 composers – male, female, English, French, Swiss, German, Romantic, modern and contemporary – bear witness to the richness of Shakespeare’s works to which this recital is dedicated.
Organised in the form of a play in five acts, including prologue and epilogue, the songs, which include several duets, are in turn cheerful and sad, light and profound, classical and jazzy – thus allowing, in Carolyn Sampson’s words, ‘a breadth of responses to these great texts’. Alongside well-known melodies, such as those by Schubert, there are musical adaptations by different composers of the same texts, as well as a contemporary reflection for the two voices by Hannah Kendall exploring the question of gender fluidity and identity through the elusive character of Rosalind from As You Like It.
After many acclaimed releases on BIS, including Album für die Frau, a collection of songs by Clara and Robert Schumann, A Soprano’s Schubertiade and Elysium, two Schubert recitals, as well as a number of themed recitals, some of which were named ‘Recording of the Month’ by MusicWeb International and ‘CD-Tipp’ by BR Klassik, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton are joined here by renowned British baritone Roderick Williams.
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Mahan Esfahani, Carolyn Sampson – Bach: Notebooks for Anna Magdalena (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:09 minutes | 1,30 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
Domestic music-making of a distinctly superior sort is lovingly recreated in a rare recording of the notebooks Bach presented to his second wife.
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Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, Dmitri Ensemble, Carolyn Sampson, Graham Ross – Ice Land: The Eternal Music (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:49 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Icelandic music of the last half century is the focus of this recording by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, led by its conductor, Graham Ross. Born from his close collaboration with the native composers of the “Land of fire and ice,” this programme sets out to explore and highlight their hypnotic soundworld, instinctively leaning towards contemplation. A prime example is the touchingly beautiful Requiem by Sigurður Sævarsson, which here receives its world premiere recording.
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Carolyn Sampson, Tapiola Sinfonietta & Pascal Rophé – Canteloube: Chants d’Auvergne (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:43 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
That Ba”il`ero, a shepherd’s song from the highlands of Auvergne sung in the Occitan dialect of the area, should become a favourite with singers ranging from Victoria de los Angeles to Sarah Brightman by way of Ren’ee Fleming and Karita Mattila, is all because of Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret. As a budding composer in Paris in the 1900s, Canteloube was unable to interest himself in the various musical cliques and currents. Instead he looked for inspiration in Auvergne in central France where he was born, starting to collect the songs of the farmers and shepherds that lived in the mountainous region. But he did so as a composer rather than a musicologist, and between 1923 and 1954 he published a total of thirty Chants d’Auvergne, arranged, harmonized and sumptuously orchestrated.
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Carolyn Sampson, Minnesota Orchestra & Osmo Vänskä – Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G Major (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:25 minutes | 938 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
In Gustav Mahler’s first four symphonies many of the themes originate in his own settings of folk poems from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn). A case in point, Symphony No. 4 is built around a single song, Das himmlische Leben (The Heavenly Life) which Mahler had composed some eight years earlier, in 1892. The song presents a child’s vision of Heaven and is hinted at throughout the first three movements. In the fourth, marked ‘Sehr behaglich’ (Very comfortably), the song is heard in full from a solo soprano instructed by Mahler to sing: ‘with serene, childlike expression; completely without parody. The symphony is scored for a typically large, late-romantic orchestra (though without trombones and tuba) and an extensive percussion section which includes sleigh bells as well as glockenspiel. However, Mahler mostly deploys his forces with a transparency and lightness more akin to chamber music or eighteenth-century models like Mozart or Haydn. The Fourth has become one of his best-loved symphonies, and is here performed by Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä, joined by the angelic voice of English soprano Carolyn Sampson.
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Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton – Album für die Frau (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:29 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
For the first four years of their marriage, Robert and Clara Schumann kept a joint diary, a project which Robert described as “a record of our wishes and our hopes, and the means whereby we may convey to one another any requests we may have to make, for which words may not suffice…”. In the imaginative recital “Album für die Frau”, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton combine songs by both composers into something similar – the depiction of a relationship seen through the eyes of both parties.
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Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton – A Soprano’s Schubertiade (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:32 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Ably written around the figure of the woman in Schubert’s Lieder, this new album by Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton uses verse from poets Helmina von Chézy, Marianne von Willemer, or poems with a female protagonist, like Goethe’s Mignon and Gretchen; Ellen in Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott, translated into German. The album closes with the mother of mothers, on the famous Ave Maria. Dubbed “the best British soprano of early music by far” by the press in her own country, this English diva has a rare versatility, which allows her to move from the extreme difficulty of Semele (Handel) to Stravinsky’s Noces, by way of Bach, which she sings with outstanding representatives of such different aesthetics as Masaaki Suzuki, Philippe Herreweghe and Riccardo Chailly.
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Carolyn Sampson, Freiburger Barockorchester, Petra Müllejans – Bach: Cantatas for Soprano (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:02 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
The three Bach cantatas presented on this album belong to the composer’s Weimar period (where he lived and worked from 1708 to 1717), written between 1711 and 1714. Bach was still a young composer then, but the full body of his artistry is already present, and one can but shake the head in disbelief: where did the fellow find the source of such intense emotion, such harmonic and melodic boldness? The beginning of “Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten” (“Yield now, troubling shadows”) unfolds a succession of harmonies which seem to have no logical link with each other, some kind of non-tonality – this being the way the composer describes in music the aforementioned lugubrious shadows. Arias alternately heartbreaking and tender, instrumental inventiveness, you name it, Bach has it. Soprano Carolyn Sampson, accompanied by the Freiburger Barockorchester (together with baritone Andreas Wolf for the cantata “Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn”), lends her voice with dedication to the music, combining the teachings of historically informed performance with a solid sense of emotion, indispensable for such masterpieces.
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Carolyn Sampson, Ex Cathedra, Jeffrey Skidmore – A French Baroque Diva (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:54 minutes | 1,37 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
This album featuring Carolyn Sampson and Ex Cathedra showcases works written for the foremost soprano of the French Baroque, Marie Fel. Voltaire called her his “adorable nightingale”. Fel held an entire generation spellbound at the Paris Opera and at Louis XV’s court during one of the most glorious periods of French music. She inspired some of Rameau’s finest music and introduced a whole new level of virtuosity and expression into the French singing tradition. Her long, triumphant career is traced through this fascinating recording.
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Carolyn Sampson, Cappella Amsterdam, Daniel Reuss – Poulenc: Stabat Mater (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:10 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Poulenc’s „Stabat Mater“, which he described as a „requiem without despair“, was written in 1950 following the death of Christian Bérard who designed the sets for Cocteau’s films and plays and was a leading figure of 1940s Paris. This masterly work, dedicated to the Virgin of Rocamadour, gives pride of place to the chorus and clearly shows its line of descent from the French grands motets. On completing it, Poulenc wrote to Pierre Bernac: ‘It’s good, because it’s completely authentic’.
From the time of his pilgrimage to Rocamadour in 1936, Poulenc’s religious output was filtered through his Catholic interpretation of the world and his personal trajectory. The ‘Stabat Mater’ is no exception to this rule, in that it associates the events and circumstances of his own life with the drama of the Gospels. It identifies the three figures of Christ, the Virgin and the Faithful Disciple with biographical figures: Bérard, Poulenc, and the latter’s lover Lucien Roubert, whom he was to refer to as ‘the secret’ of the ‘Stabat Mater’ and ‘Dialogues des Carmélites’.
In December 1959 Leonard Bernstein commissioned a new work from Poulenc for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He chose to write the ‘Sept Répons des Ténèbres’ (Seven Tenebrae Responses) for treble soloist, a chorus of boys’ and men’s voices and symphony orchestra. The posthumous first performance took place on 11 April 1963 at Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) under the direction of Thomas Schippers. Poulenc had insisted on these all-male vocal forces, but, 50 years after his death, it is important to allow for more widespread performance of this fascinating score which has too long languished in the shadows.
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Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton – The Contrast: English Poetry in Song (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:21:06 minutes | 1,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Song composition has been a constant in British music since the lute and consort works of the early seventeenth century. By 1900, it had developed into a sophisticated genre embraced by almost all serious composers. The music on this amply-filled disc illustrates the diversity of British song-writing and its transformation over a century: from Vaughan Williams’s Orpheus and his Lute (ca 1901) to HuwWatkins’s Five Larkin Songs, composed in 2010 for Carolyn Sampson, who performs them here. Together with Joseph Middleton, her partner on several acclaimed recital discs, she has devised a highly contrasting programme bookended by two groups of songs by William Walton – A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table from 1962, celebrating the diversity of London, and three songs from Façade, the ‘entertainment’ with which the young composer gained both fame and notoriety in 1923.These frame settings by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilterand Frank Bridge of poetry by writers from Shakespeare and Shelley to Keats and Yeats. In comparison, the anti-romantic poems by Philip Larkin have been described as marked by ‘a very English, glum accuracy’. Huw Watkins (b. 1976) has selected texts from across Larkin’s output, catching the various moods – ranging from a certain unsentimental nostalgia to the poet’s seemingly habitual pessimism – in settings that often carry a bittersweet sting in the tail.
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Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton – Reason in Madness (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:50 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Throughout history, men have feared madwomen, burning them as witches, confining them in asylums and subjecting them to psychoanalysis – yet, they have also been fascinated, unable to resist fantasizing about them. For their new album, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton have created a programme that explores the responses of a variety of composers to women whose stories have left them vulnerable and exposed. As a motto they have chosen an aphorism by Nietzsche: ‘There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.’
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