The gestation of this project lasted two years. Anna Prohaska and Julius Drake finally concentrated their research on the themes of Eve, Paradise and banishment. Some songs were obvious choices, such as Fauré's Paradis, in which God appears to Eve and asks her to name each flower and animal, or Purcell's Sleep, Adam, sleep with it's references to Genesis. But Anna Prohaska also wished to illustrate the cliché of the woman who brought original sin into the world and her status as a tempter who leads man astray, as in Brahms's Salamander, Wolf's Die Bekehrte or Ravel's Air du Feu.

One of the leading mezzos of our day in a Schubert recital which offers seventy minutes of pure pleasure. The twenty-one songs recorded here are among Schubert’s finest, from ‘Erlkönig’ (written in the composer’s annus mirabilis of 1815) to ‘Leise flehen’ (which dates from his final summer).

This latest release from the multi-award-winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake features a literary and musical form which inspired the greatest voices of German Romanticism. The foremost poets and composers of the age saw the ballad as a direct link to the folk-minstrels of the past. Frequently ghoulish and sensational in character, ballads satisfied the popular taste for the Gothic.

The musical world has not lacked for singers to interpret the songs of Edvard Grieg, starting with the composer's wife Nina and moving through the sublime Kirsten Flagstad to the sensual Anne Sofie von Otter. Grieg's songs have been well served by sopranos and mezzo-sopranos. In her second disc for Hyperion, Swedish mezzo Katarina Karnéus performs 25 of Grieg's 180 songs. Some are nearly folk songs sung in Norwegian; some are true art songs in German; but all are deeply expressive, highly emotional, and, in these performances, entirely successful.

Nathan Berg is already well known to audiences from his many recordings in operas, cantatas, masses and symphonies working with conductors such as Rene Jacob, William Christie and Robert Shaw. He has recorded for Harmonia Mundi, Telarc, Philips and Erato. On Hyperion he has recently appeared with Marjana Lipovsek in Graham Johnson’s complete Schubert series, and with Sophie Daneman in Mendelssohn. For his debut solo disc on ATMA Nathan Berg has selected a programme covering more than a century of romantic German lieder, including some of the best-loved songs of the genre by Schumann, Brahms, Strauss and Schubert.

The song cycles of Ralph Vaughan Williams recorded here, some of them including instruments other than the piano, are some of his most characteristic early works. One hears both his growing interest in folk song and his indebtedness to Ravel, put together with a piquant kind of youthful ambition. In the opening Four Hymns for tenor, piano, and viola, the generally agnostic or atheist Vaughan Williams composed some lovely examples in the rare genre of religious art song. The only really well-known set here is 1909's On Wenlock Edge, and the Britishness of the whole project is shown by the fact that the annotator does not feel it necessary to name the author of the texts. It is A.E. Housman, whose faux-simple verses are ideally suited to the natural voice of tenor Nicky Spence.

The recital begins with Keats and ends with Shakespeare: that can’t be bad. But it also begins with Stanford and ends with Parry; what would the modernists of their time have thought about that? They would probably not have believed that those two pillars of the old musical establishment would still be standing by in 1999. And in fact how well very nearly all these composers stand! Quilter’s mild drawing–room manners might have been expected to doom him, but the three songs here – the affectionate, easy grace of his Tennyson setting, the restrained passion of his ‘Come away, death’ and the infectious zest of ‘I will go with my father a–ploughing’ – endear him afresh and demonstrate once again the wisdom of artists who recognise their own small area of ‘personal truth’ and refuse to betray it in exchange for a more fashionable ‘originality’.

Allan Clayton demonstrates his exceptional versatility with a Liszt programme of eighteen songs, all of which—in contrasting ways—make prodigious technical and musical demands of the performers.

This fourth volume in our scholarly compendium once more charts Liszt’s life through song (including three settings spanning as many decades of a portentous love-letter the composer received in 1841). Series maestro Julius Drake welcomes the gorgeous Sasha Cooke to Hyperion.

This second volume of Hyperion’s newest Lieder series features the great dramatic and musical gifts of mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager. Internationally renowned on the opera stage, the concert hall and the recording studio, Kirchschlager is an ideal performer of these most varied, complex and emotionally charged songs. She is accompanied by the multi-Gramophone Award-winning Julius Drake, who curates the series.

The start of another Hyperion Lieder series is always cause for celebration. In advance of his bicentenary in 2011, we turn to a composer whose songs, against the vast bulk of his compositions in larger genres, were considered insignificant for well over a century.

A programme of exquisite miniatures, alternative versions and a wonderful quasi-operatic scena: this is a tantalizing Lisztian recital to showcase the artistry of Julia Kleiter.