- Performer: Hellen Kwon, Endrik Wottrich, Michael Kraus, Marita Posselt
- Orchestra: Berlin Radio Chorus, Berlin Deutsches Symphony Orchestra
- Conductor: Lothar Zagrosek
- Composer: Walter Braunfels
- Audio CD (17 Jan 1997)
- SPARS Code: DDD
- Number of Discs: 2
- Label: Entartete Musik
- ASIN: B0000042E6
- Other Editions: MP3 Download
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 54,789 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
The half-Jewish composer Walter Braunfels somehow managed to evade the Nazis to survive into the 1950s. He worked as a composer, conductor and teacher (in Cologne) and produced a handful of operas with engagingly eccentric titles, piano, vocal and chamber music, all employing a full-blooded late romantic style which is not especially derivative or reminiscent of anyone else. This is refreshing.
Die Vögel, revived in Geneva in January 2004, some years after this excellent recording, surprises and delights all who hear it. The story is from Aristophanes, and so is now some 2,500 years old. The leaders of the bird kingdom are disastrously misled by two strangers from the world of men into defying Zeus by building a city, "Cloud-cuckoo-land" which interrupts the flow of communication between mankind and the Gods. The city is duly wiped out in a storm once Zeus notices. in the process the Nightingale and the more sensitive of the two men fall in love.
The perfomances throughout, the direction and the recorded sound, round and full in the Decca tradition, are all beyond praise, especially the coloratura soprano, Hellen Kwon, whose stratospheric melisma is at the same time unearthly, romantically touching and immensely assured. She comes quite close to taking your breath away.
Buy it and revel. The opera is not so long: you will heve the first of many lovely evenings listening to it again and again.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
This opera was apparently a favourite of Bruno Walter and after its premiere in 1920 enjoyed fifty performances in Munich alone before the Nazis got to their wicked work and in 1933 drove out the half-Jewish Braunfels, when he was fifty years old and at the peak of his career.
There are definite echoes of Wagner in more relaxed mode, such as in "Die Meistersinger." However, comparisons with Richard Strauss are even more inevitable, even though Braunfel's idiom is generally more tender, naïve and light-hearted than Strauss. Both composers were drawn to the Greek classical world and the closest cousins to "Die Vögel" must be Strauss's "Daphne" and "Die Liebe der Danae", both in setting and style. The rôles of Daphne and the Nightingale have a great deal in common with their soaring melismata; there is a lovely moment at the end of Track 2 when Helen Kwon's top D is echoed by the flute and there is scarcely any difference in their timbres, so pure is her sound. I know nothing of the conductor Lothar Zagrosek but he seems to have a firm grasp of proceedings and prevents the music from sounding too uniformly pretty by injecting plenty of pace and drive into the proceedings when required. The choral singing from the Rundfunkchor is full and spirited, the orchestra is exemplary and the sound a model of clarity and balance. My favourite sections of the score are the extended love duet for the Nightingale and the human Hoffegut (Good Hope) that opens Act 2 - tenor Hendrik Wottrich copes here with some heroic outbursts far removed from the world of German light opera - and the Chorus of Birds which follows it, when they are praising their citadel.
I was assured by the pleasant gentleman who sold me this on ebay that I would enjoy it, and he was right. So why only four stars, especially when all other reviewers give five? Well, this is a personal preference, but I have an aversion to that throaty, "Kermit" sound affected by so many male German singers and I find that very much in evidence in the baritones of Wolfgang Holzmair and, particularly, Matthias Görne, who quite spoils the rôle of Prometheus for me, despite the adulation this Fischer-Dieskau protégé enjoys - but then, I am not a D-F-D fan, either...hear for yourself and don't hold it against it me if you disagree; taste in voices is rather subjective. Nor do I think that this is an absolute masterpiece; there are conversational longueurs in Act 1 and the music ultimately lacks the variety to sustain complete interest over two and a quarter hours, but I would encourage anyone who likes late Romantic music to become acquainted with this charming opera.
There are definite echoes of Wagner in more relaxed mode, such as in "Die Meistersinger." However, comparisons with Richard Strauss are even more inevitable, even though Braunfel's idiom is generally more tender, naïve and light-hearted than Strauss. Both composers were drawn to the Greek classical world and the closest cousins to "Die Vögel" must be Strauss's "Daphne" and "Die Liebe der Danae", both in setting and style. The rôles of Daphne and the Nightingale have a great deal in common with their soaring melismata; there is a lovely moment at the end of Track 2 when Helen Kwon's top D is echoed by the flute and there is scarcely any difference in their timbres, so pure is her sound. I know nothing of the conductor Lothar Zagrosek but he seems to have a firm grasp of proceedings and prevents the music from sounding too uniformly pretty by injecting plenty of pace and drive into the proceedings when required. The choral singing from the Rundfunkchor is full and spirited, the orchestra is exemplary and the sound a model of clarity and balance. My favourite sections of the score are the extended love duet for the Nightingale and the human Hoffegut (Good Hope) that opens Act 2 - tenor Hendrik Wottrich copes here with some heroic outbursts far removed from the world of German light opera - and the Chorus of Birds which follows it, when they are praising their citadel.
I was assured by the pleasant gentleman who sold me this on ebay that I would enjoy it, and he was right. So why only four stars, especially when all other reviewers give five? Well, this is a personal preference, but I have an aversion to that throaty, "Kermit" sound affected by so many male German singers and I find that very much in evidence in the baritones of Wolfgang Holzmair and, particularly, Matthias Görne, who quite spoils the rôle of Prometheus for me, despite the adulation this Fischer-Dieskau protégé enjoys - but then, I am not a D-F-D fan, either...hear for yourself and don't hold it against it me if you disagree; taste in voices is rather subjective. Nor do I think that this is an absolute masterpiece; there are conversational longueurs in Act 1 and the music ultimately lacks the variety to sustain complete interest over two and a quarter hours, but I would encourage anyone who likes late Romantic music to become acquainted with this charming opera.
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