Baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and pianist Imogen Cooper’s magic partnership celebrated in new box set

Box set features the ‘magic bond’ between Austrian singer Wolfgang Holzmair and British star pianist Imogen Cooper

British pianist Imogen Cooper formed a magical musical partnership with Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair.

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Classical singers sometimes, but not always, form a kind of magic bond with their accompanists and such was the case when Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair made a series of recordings with British star pianist Imogen Cooper for the Philips label in the late 1980s through to the Millennium.

The two artists just seemed to have that undefinable musical chemistry and over 15 years or so they recorded Schubert’s three great cycles – Die schone Mullerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang – along with two volumes of Schumann songs, including some by his wife Clara, some Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn and a mixed bag of settings of poems by Joseph von Eichendorff by various composers including Hugo Wolf and Mendelssohn.

Now Decca Eloquence has released a box set of 13 discs comprising the baritone’s complete recitals for Philips, including Brahms’s German Requiem performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Herbert Blomstedt.

The Holzmair-Cooper partnership occupies the first eight albums of the set and there are some gems among them. Holzmair has an unusually light and smooth tenor timbre for a baritone, so the Schubert and Schumann that you hear is not as muscular as modern-day Schubertians like Matthias Goerne or Florian Boesch. But it is athletic and expressive and with a silvery tone which can catch at the heart in the softer passages.

Holzmair has an innate sense of poetry and line, as does Cooper, and this is why the partnership works so well.

Album artwork for Decca's 2022 box set of Wolfgang Holzmair's complete Philips recitals.

For the other albums he used a variety of pianists.

Schubert’s Winterreise influenced two works featured in this set, and both of them are rarities. Ernst Krenek, an Austrian-American composer, fled the Nazis to settle in the US just before World War II and his song cycle Reisebuch aus den osterreicher Alpen acts as a fascinating counter to the Schubert set.

And Hanns Eisler, another Austrian exile, wrote Hollywood Songbook during the war years, reflecting on what was happening to his country and the terrifying rise of Nazism.

For the rest of the set Holzmair shows that he is equally at home singing in French by giving some superlative treatment to songs by Ravel, Faure, Berlioz, Debussy and Ibert, among others.

Wolfgang Holzmair – The Philips Recitals is available from classicsdirect.com.au for $89.95.