Miriam Feuersinger, Klaus Mertens – Dialog-Kantaten (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:28 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Christophorus
Bach’s dialog cantatas occupy a very special place in his vast oeuvre of cantatas: As if in a personal dialog, the “Christian soul” (soprano) and “Christ” (bass) enter into a dialogue, designed by Bach as a spiritual “love duet”, which Miriam Feuersinger and Klaus Mertens interpret here in the most intimate way imaginable. The two cantatas Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen BWV 49 and Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen BWV 32 are complemented by Christoph Graupner’s oboe concerto in C major GWV 302, performed by oboist Elisabeth Grümmer.
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Klaus Mertens, Dmitri Grigoriev – Cantabo Domino (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:13:47 minutes | 685 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ars Produktion
“An excellent master of his craft” (M. Harras). For four decades, bass-baritone Klaus Mertens has been acclaimed by critics in concerts and nearly 200 album recordings as “unearthly radiant”, “wonderfully slender, clearly delineating” and “unchanged fresh and immensely homogeneous” for his interpretations of music ranging from early to avant-garde. Dmitri Grigoriev was born in 1979 in Leningrad and studied organ and piano after private lessons at the conservatories in St. Petersburg and Kazan, where he completed his studies in 2007 with the state concert exam.
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Klaus Mertens & Volodymyr Lavrynenko – Friedrich Theodor Fröhlich: Lieder & Elegies (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:04 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Rondeau Production
Friedrich Theodor Fröhlich, born in Brugg in 1803, is probably the most important Early Romantic composer in Switzerland. However, he shares with many of his colleagues the fate of being forgotten after his death in 1836. Today, more than 700 works are kept in the manuscript archive of the Basel University Library. Thanks to the International Friedrich Theodor Fröhlich Society based in Brugg, this legacy has been rediscovered since 2017, edited piece by piece and performed in concerts. Bass-baritone Klaus Mertens follows in Fröhlich’s footsteps and, together with lied pianist Volodymyr Lavrynenko, takes an exciting look at Fröhlich’s extensive lied oeuvre: Eight Canzonettas on poems by Goethe and Uhland, among others, as well as the Declamatory Songs, in which the performers feel the composer’s emotional vibrations, are framed by three elegies for solo piano with a haunting tonal language and sometimes astonishing twists.
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