Erich Korngold, a child prodigy pianist and composer, was acquainted with Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, and revolutionized film-music composition after fleeing Austria in 1938.
Recording & Production
This album was recorded at The Menuhin Hall, Cobham, United Kingdom, between August 14-18, 2021.
Composer's Artistic Vision
The album's program explores the tension in expansive, richly chromatic post-romantic songs on the brink of expressionism, atonality, and the breakdown of formal compositional structure.
Historical Context
Late-romantic poetry, featured in this album, often includes themes of nature, inner consciousness, mortality, and spirituality, viewed as a response to the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment.
Compositional Technique
Richard Strauss and Joseph Marx composed for the soprano voice in a way that elevated its flexibility, height, speed, timbre, and pitched it against the warm, full depths of the piano.
Album & Artwork
The album title "Burnished Gold" and its concept are inspired by Gustav Klimt's use of gold-leaf in his paintings, emblematic of 1900s Vienna.
Composer Biography
Johanna Müller-Hermann, who studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky, became the first woman in Austria or Germany to hold a professorship of music theory at the New Vienna Conservatory after World War One.
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