Christa Ludwig's legendary voice celebrated in box set
ONE of the great voices of the 20th century, German mezzo soprano Christa Ludwig, recently turned 90 and to celebrate Deutsche Grammophon has issued a magnificent box set.
Wentworth Courier
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ONE of the great voices of the 20th century, German mezzo soprano Christa Ludwig, recently turned 90 and to celebrate Deutsche Grammophon has issued a magnificent 12-disc box set featuring some of her landmark recordings with Herbert von Karajan, Karl Bohm, Leonard Bernstein and Sir Georg Solti, among many others.
And it’s not just hearing excerpts of her gold standard performances of Wagner, Mahler and Richard Strauss which will delight the listener — there are four discs of lieder by Schubert, Schumann and Wolf as icing on the cake.
The set is arranged chronologically so we can track her career through the 1950s and early ‘60s with Bohm, into the golden age of the Karajan and Bernstein recordings in the mid-1960s and 1970s to some of her work in the 1980s.
There are recorded interviews rounding out a couple of the discs. Unfortunately you need to understand German, but there are translations in the booklet which accompanies the set.
As well as the great late Romantic German works there are a couple of albums which give an idea of Ludwig’s versatile repertoire — an album of Bach excerpts, conducted by Karajan, and various arias and songs from a wide range of composers including Pergolesi, Debussy, Puccini, Bartok and Orff.
The Bernstein disc combines the landmark DG recordings of the Mahler symphonic cycle — excerpts from the Resurrection and Symphony No. 3 — with her wonderful work on Bernstein’s own music, including three tracks from Candide which prompted the composer to say “she’s simply the best, and the best of all possible human beings”.
TREASURE
Her lieder catalogue has been somewhat eclipsed by her opera and orchestral recordings, but they contain plenty of delights and a bit of a curiosity in her wonderful reading of Schubert’s Winterreise, a song cycle more usually associated with male tenor, baritone or bass singers.
Another highlight is her performance of Wolff’s Italian Songbook — a treasure trove of remarkable songs, none of which is more than two minutes long. Daniel Barenboim is her accompanist here and their collaboration brings this glorious box set to a fitting conclusion.
Other collaborators include Birgitt Nilsson, Rita Streich, Mirella Freni, Nicolai Gedda, Walter Berry (to whom she was married for a time) and many others.
The Christa Ludwig Edition is available at Fish Fine Music for $79.99.