Lieder from Fatma Said and friends

It’s been over two years since we had a solo album from the delectable Egyptian soprano Fatma Said, and her classy interim cameos on Jakub Józef Orliński’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Fabio Luisi’s Nielsen cycle have only served to fuel the appetite. Well, today’s Recording of the Week bears out the old adage that anything worth having is worth waiting for. Featuring two of the finest song-pianists around (namely Malcolm Martineau and Joseph Middleton) and a guest-list including clarinettist Sabine Meyer and rising-star baritone Huw Montague Rendall, it already looks great on paper – but the whole adds up to even more than the considerable sum of its parts.

As the generic title suggests, there’s nothing fancy about the concept: no overarching themes or narrative through-line, just a collection of favourite Lieder by Schubert, Brahms, Robert Schumann and the Mendelssohn siblings, performed with the tenderest loving care by musicians who clearly adore working together. It’s an unexpectedly traditional approach for an artist whose previous solo projects have included the much-garlanded El Nour (a celebration of Said’s Egyptian heritage) and the dance-inspired album Kaleidoscope, on which she turned her hand to everything from My Fair Lady to Whitney Houston – but it provides ample proof that Said is every bit as compelling in core repertoire as she is when roaming more widely.

Said’s love and affinity for the German language shine through in every phrase, and are born of long immersion: before training at the Hanns Eisler Academy in Berlin, she attended a German kindergarten and high school in her native Cairo, where an inspirational teacher’s illumination of Goethe’s Faust (her set text for the Abitur qualification) ignited a passion for German literature which paid rich dividends when she went on to study and perform Lieder.

The tone is set by a wistful, confiding account of one of the most famous German songs of them all: ‘Ständchen’ from Schubert’s Schwanengesang, given with just a hint of hushed breathiness in the tone and some beautifully-judged rubato from Martineau (who must have played this song thousands of times but sounds as if he’s falling in love with it all over again here). Said has a wonderful way of gently underlining key words like ‘Klagen’ and ‘Liebesschmerz’ without ever sounding didactic, and of making the voice smile when appropriate - something that’s very much to the fore in the deliciously exuberant account of ‘The Shepherd on the Rock’ which follows (Meyer is on top form too here, fielding a rustic, out-of-doors tone which meshes gorgeously with Said’s open but never overbright timbre).

Next up is another Schubert serenade, this time of a more rumbustious variety: ‘Zögernd leise’ for solo voice and chorus, which features a star turn by students from Said’s alma mater as a bunch of noisy revellers making an impromptu nocturnal call on their beloved. And towards the end of the programme, we’re invited to eavesdrop on an after-dark visit with a very different outcome indeed: Schumann’s ‘Liebhabers Ständchen’, where Montague Rendall and Said exude such breathless eroticism that you almost feel you shouldn’t be listening in...

Other highlights include three Brahms songs with harpist Anneleen Lenaerts which take on a spare, folksy beauty when transferred from the piano, and the late Aribert Reimann’s haunting arrangements of the same composer’s Ophelia-Lieder for voice and string quartet. The eerie colours which the Arod Quartet conjure up in the second song recall the glass harmonica which accompanies Lucia di Lammermoor in her mad-scene, and elsewhere they imitate the sound of the hurdy-gurdy as Ophelia recollects fragments of folksong in her distress.

But the stand-outs for me were the two Gothic vignettes in the first half of the programme: a genuinely chilling account of Schubert’s macabre ‘Der Zwerg’ (where Said digs deep into chest-voice for the titular dwarf’s vengeful ravings) and Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Hexenlied’, a miniature Night On The Bare Mountain which Said dispatches with pitch-black, witchy glee as Middleton scampers fearlessly around the keyboard.

So, cards on the table: this is one of the most compelling Lieder recordings I’ve heard in years, and I urge anyone who loves German song to give it a whirl.