Lieder
Fatma Said (soprano), Malcolm Martineau (piano), Joseph Middleton (piano), Huw Montague Rendall (baritone), Sabine Meyer (clarinet), Anneleen Lenaerts (harp), Quatuor Arod
Awards:
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Presto Recording of the Week, 7th February 2025
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Gramophone Magazine, April 2025, Editor's Choice
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Presto Recordings of the Year, Finalist 2025
listeners who fear a trudge through long-flattened terrain need not worry. This approach reveals new features in the landscape...Said’s voice is recorded to maximise intimacy of sound. She takes...
Lieder
Fatma Said (soprano), Malcolm Martineau (piano), Joseph Middleton (piano), Huw Montague Rendall (baritone), Sabine Meyer (clarinet), Anneleen Lenaerts (harp), Quatuor Arod
Purchase product
Other available formats
Awards:
-
Presto Recording of the Week, 7th February 2025
-
Gramophone Magazine, April 2025, Editor's Choice
-
Presto Recordings of the Year, Finalist 2025
listeners who fear a trudge through long-flattened terrain need not worry. This approach reveals new features in the landscape...Said’s voice is recorded to maximise intimacy of sound. She takes...
About
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. Also, 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.”
Contents and tracklist
- Fatma Said (soprano), MGV Walhalla zum Seidlwirt (vocal ensemble), Yonatan Cohen (piano)
Spotlight on this release
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Fatma Said on Lieder
26th Feb 2025
In the wake of her recent recording of songs by Schubert, Brahms, Robert Schumann and the Mendelssohns, the Egyptian soprano discusses how her passion for the German language and literature was ignited during her childhood in Cairo, the joy of making music with true friends - and why her heart lies in the concert-hall rather than the opera-house for the moment...
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Lieder from Fatma Said and friends
7th Feb 2025
The Egyptian soprano is joined by pianists Malcolm Martineau and Joseph Middleton (and an array of special guests including clarinettist Sabine Meyer and rising young baritone Huw Montague Rendall) for a programme of favourite Lieder by Schubert, Brahms, Robert Schumann and the Mendelssohn siblings.
Awards and reviews
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Presto Recording of the Week7th February 2025
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Gramophone MagazineApril 2025Editor's Choice
-
Presto Recordings of the YearFinalist 2025
April 2025
listeners who fear a trudge through long-flattened terrain need not worry. This approach reveals new features in the landscape...Said’s voice is recorded to maximise intimacy of sound. She takes risks with colours, breaths and keys, enabling listeners to encounter her full vocal and expressive range.
April 2025
She’s a natural in the repertoire, with impeccable German (picked up in German kindergarten and school in Cairo and then from living in Berlin for her studies) and an instinctive knack for the idiom.
7th February 2025
Said’s love and affinity for the German language shine through in every phrase...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 she dispatches with pitch-black, witchy glee as Middleton scampers fearlessly around the keyboard.
19th February 2025
Her voice, with its distinctive fast vibrato, certainly makes some succulent sounds singing wonderful Schubert and Schumann, plus the two Mendelssohns and Brahms...Said’s goal, she says, was to express the texts rather than obsess over beautiful singing. Sometimes she transposes songs in order to favour her speaking voice (purists beware), though the words and feelings ring out clearly even when she doesn’t and beauty is never comprised for long.
