Lieder

While soprano Fatma Said’s previous Warner Classics releases crossed cultures and musical genres, this album focuses entirely on German-language songs of the Romantic era: lieder by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. At the age of 18, Fatma left her native Cairo to study at the Hanns Eisler Conservatory in Berlin and “Ever since then, the joy of singing this genre has been central to my musical life … I am very passionate about lieder … This wonderful combination of great German poetry and genius composers like Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms.” In the conventional course of things, a lieder recital involves one singer and one pianist, but Fatma Said, saying “I’ve always wanted to make music with friends”, has called on the talents of no fewer than three pianists – Malcolm Martineau, Joseph Middleton and Yonatan Cohen, and of harpist Anneleen Lenaerts, clarinettist Sabine Meyer (in Schubert’s ‘Der Hirt auf dem Felsen’), Quatuor Arod (accompanying Brahms’ Ophelia-Lieder in an arrangement by Aribert Reimann, who died in March 2024), male-voice ensemble Walhalla zum Seidlwirt, and another singer on the ascent – baritone Huw Montague Rendall. The programme features some of the world’s best-loved lieder, such as Schubert’s ‘Ständchen’, Schumann’s ‘Widmung’ and Brahms’ ‘Wie Melodien zieht es mir’, but it also explores less familiar repertoire. Throughout the album, Fatma Said places a crucial emphasis on the poetic texts: “My priority was to convey the characterisation of the words most of all … Differentiating between diverse kinds of expressive worlds is for me what lieder-singing is all about.”