"A truly unusual Album!

"When faced with the transience of life and the death of loved ones and companions, many composers turn to faith and sacred music. ‘He is such a great man, such a great soul, but he believes in nothing,’ said the devout Catholic Antonín Dvořák of his friend Johannes Brahms. However, Brahms was not an atheist. He was a religious free spirit. He knew the Bible very well, and it was more a source of his cultural identity than a dogmatic creed.

Clara Schumann died in 1896. He himself suspected that his time would soon come; the first symptoms of his illness were already showing. After forty years, he returned to the organ. In his last work, op. 122, which was published in 1902, five years after his death in 1897, he sought support in the contrapuntal order of the old Lutheran death chorales such as ‘O Welt, ich muss dich lassen’ and embedded them in a heavy, warm, polyphonic organ movement.

Such organ chorale preludes are often interpreted uniformly: the same tempo, colors and organ stops for every piece. However, the Basel cathedral organist, Andreas Liebig, makes the most of Brahms’ entire dynamic and harmonic range, bringing something unique and personal to each prelude.

Autobiographical interpretations of music are often not free of clichés. In Liebig’s case, however, the chorale prelude ‘O Gott, du frommer Gott’ seems to capture the soul of the resigned yet desperate composer on the brink of death. At times, there is a sense of rebellion; at others, hesitation. Then, everything seems to fall out of rhythm.

Gudrun Sidonie Otto’s bright soprano voice and nuanced, soulful delivery enhance her performance of Antonín Dvořák’s Biblical Songs (Biblické písně), Op. 99.

For his song cycle, completed in New York in 1894, Dvořák set texts from the Kralice Bible, the most significant Czech translation of the Holy Scriptures. Dvořák’s publisher Simrock encountered significant challenges in creating a German rendition of the Czech psalms, as the emphasis and meaning of the words differ considerably in both languages, impacting the melodic line of the singing voice. Otto sings the German version. A truly unusual Album!"

Teresa Pieschacón Raphael