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Konrad Jarnot, baritone · Alexander Schmalcz, piano

Vocal works were seminal for composer Hermann Zilcher, born 1881 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Zilcher, who was also active as a Lied accompanist, wrote 82 Lieder for voice and piano. This CD presents Konrad Jarnot with his accompanist Alexander Schmalcz performing two of Zilcher’s Lied cycles: opus 60, after poems by Eichendorff, and 15 Lieder after fairy tale poems by Wilhelm Hey (1789–1854). After working in Frankfurt und Munich, Hermann Zilcher was appointed director of the Würzburg State Music Conservatory and shaped the city’s musical life for over 25 years. In 1922, he founded the Würzburg Mozart Festival in the Residence, which continues to enjoy an international reputation. In his young career, Konrad Jarnot has already achieved great success with recordings of Lieder by Mahler, Mozart, Strauss and others. Winning First Prize at the ARD Music Competition opened him the door to the upper echelons, and he is now heard in the world’s renowned concert houses.

Hermann Zilcher(1881-1949)

Hermann Zilcher was born on August 18, 1881 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He started piano studies at the age of five with his father, Paul Zilcher, a well known piano teacher. At 16, he entered the Frankfurt Conservatory of Music, whose director and composition teacher Bernhard Scholz, a close friend of Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim, had a lasting stylistic influence on him. After completing his studies, a scholarship of the “Mozart Prize for the Support and Education of Musical Talent in Composition” enabled him to live in Berlin as a freelance musician for four years (1901–1905). He quickly made a name for himself as a composer and piano accompanist.

In 1905, he accepted a position as piano teacher at the Frankfurt Conservatory of Music, remaining until Felix Mottl appointed him professor of composition at the Munich Academy of Music in 1908. He held a position at that institution as professor for piano from 1912 to 1920 and as professor for composition as of 1919. Carl Orff was among his Munich students.

In Munich, Zilcher’s successes included theater music written in cooperation with Otto Falckenberg, the director of the Kammerspiele, the Deutsches Volksliederspiel, op. 32 (1915) and the Piano Quintet in C# Minor op. 42 (1919). His Liebesmesse op. 27, based on texts by Will Vesper, was premiered in 1913 with great success by Hans Pfitzner in Strasbourg. In 1920, Zilcher applied for the position as director of the Academy of Music in Munich, which had just become free. Almost simultaneously, however, he was appointed director of the State Conservatory in Würzburg, and ended up accepting this position.

Zilcher’s most important successes took place during the 25 years of his Würzburg tenure. He reorganized the State Conservatory, started new courses of training and an orchestral preparation department, and generally increased the conservatory’s quality standards. Although asked to become director of the Leipzig Conservatory in 1924, he refused this request. In 1922, he founded the Würzburg Mozart Festival in the city’s palace, an event which remains associated with his name and continues to enjoy an international reputation. He influenced Würzburg’s musical life as a composer, pianist and composer and in addition, achieved a far-reaching reputation throughout German-speaking regions. His ambitious plans to erect a monumental new building in Würzburg’s Rosenbachpark to house the Academy of Music could no longer be realized at the beginning of the Second World War, however.

In 1941, on his 60th birthday, Zilcher was awarded the “Goethe Medal for the Arts and Sciences” and the “Silver Ribbon” by the city of Würzburg as a sign of its esteem, as well as the “Golden Mozart Medal of the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg”. In the same year, Wilhelm Furtwängler premiered Zilcher’s Violin Concerto No. 2 op. 92 with the Berlin Philharmonic.

In the difficult times following the end of the Second World War in 1945, Zilcher was able to complete two major works, his symphonic cantata Du aber, Herr, bist unser Vater, op. 111 and the Fifth Symphony op. 112 (with the title “… und dennoch!”). He died on New Year’s Eve, January 1, 1948.

After a long phase of obscurity, during which Zilcher was almost forgotten, interest for his person and his music has grown again. The current times are rediscovering the fine intermediate shadings of his music, rooted as it is in the late romantic tradition. Zilcher’s delicate but vital music earns being listened to and performed once again.

In addition to stage and orchestral works as well as chamber and piano music, the focus of the composer’s extensive oeuvre is highly varied vocal music, including 82 Lieder with piano. Zilcher profiled himself as a piano accompanist from his early years in Berlin on, gaining great musical experience as the partner of renowned singers during this time. Singer and recitalist Ludwig Wüllner (1858–1938) played an important role for him. In Zilcher’s autobiographical sketches from 1945, he praises Wüllner with the words: “He encouraged me exceptionally in textual, vocal and all other musical matters.” Zilcher dedicated his first book of Lieder, the Five Lieder op. 10 (1903/04) to Dutch mezzo-soprano Julia Culp (1890–1970), whom Zilcher met at the end of her studies in Berlin and who was later to become one of the major Lied interpreters of her generation. In his Munich years, he concertized with Hungarian soprano Maria Ivogün (1891–1987), a celebrated singer at the Munich State Opera. In Würzburg, he married soprano Margret Kiesekamp (his fourth wife), a sensitive interpreter of his Lieder, to whom he also dedicated a number of his vocal works.

Similar to his instrumental music, Zilcher’s vocal music is characterized by an exceptional feel for the genre, an avowal to tradition, but also by significant experimentation. Musically, each song has its own individual mood and treatment. The vocal line – except for occasional chromatic passages – is almost always cantabile. The melody is shaped according to the dictates of the text; the overall musical structure is formed by the text as well. Especially in the Goethe and Dehmel Lieder, the quality of the text declamation evokes Hugo Wolf. The piano accompaniments are equal in status to the vocal lines as well as highly sensitive and varied; they often include precise dynamics and pedal markings. This lends increasing lightness and transparency to the frequently chordal accompaniment in the later Lied collections.



Alexander Schmalcz

Alexander Schmalcz took his first piano lesson as a member of the Dresden Kreuzchor. He was a student of Iain Burnside and Graham Johnson at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

The young pianist has won the Gerald Moore Award (1996) and the Megan Foster Accompanist Prize.

Alexander Schmalcz has appeared as a guest performer in the great music centres of Europe, America and Japan. Thereto he has played at renowned music festivals and at Wigmore Hall in London, the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Wiener Musikverein, the Hamburger Staatsoper, the Chatelet Paris, the Berliner Philharmonie, the Leipziger Gewandhaus, the Kölner Philharmonie, the Théâtre de la Monnaie Bruxelles, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Salzburger Theater Festival, the Schleswig Holstein Musikfestival, the Schwetzinger Festspiele, the Tanglewood Festival and the Prague Spring Festival.

As an accompanist he has worked with such international singers as Grace Bumbry, Peter Schreier, Matthias Goerne, Konrad Jarnot, Stephan Genz, Christiane Oelze, Eva Mei and Doris Soffel.

In 2005, he accompanied Peter Schreier on his farewell tour throughout Japan and Korea.

His partners for chamber music are the Petersen Quartet and the actors Julia Stemberger and Hans-Jürgen Schatz.

He has made numerous CD recordings for various music labels and radio companies. Together with Konrad Jarnot, he has released songs of Mozart on the OehmsClassics label.

Alexander Schmalcz has instructed at the Robert-Schumann-Hochschule in Düsseldorf since 1999, and has also instructed Master Classes, among others at Wigmore Hall.

The Munich Concert Society invited him to be a juror at the Munich “German Romantic Song” competition in 2004.