Barber: The Lovers, Op. 43

Landesjugendchor Sachsen; Häßler, Martin; Entleutner, Ron-Dirk; Jugendsinfonieorchester Leipzig

To associate Samuel Barber (1910-1981) exclusively with the famous Adagio for Strings, Op. 11 is to ignore so much else: in The Lovers, Op. 43, the great American composer sets the Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda so masterfully to music as to raise the sensuality and the poetry of his text to new heights; The Lovers, Op. 43 is surely Samuel Barber's most intimate work. Barber's teacher, Randall Thompson (1899-1984), also reveals his poetical side when he sets the poems of Robert Frost to music in Frostiana. Both works combine profound texts with a musical passion, which can become, by means the fullness of orchestral sound, ecstatic. To achieve this requires artists who have fully explored the music and its significance. The Leipzig Youth Symphony Orchestra and its conductor, Ron-Dirk Entleutner, can justifiably claim having achieved exactly this - significantly, the orchestra was invited to Chicago in 2014 in order to perform precisely this piece of Barbers. For this production, the fresh, energetic orchestra found congenial partners in the Landesjugendchor Sachsen and baritone Martin Häßler, all of whom are wonderfully capable of realizing the entire musical and emotional spectrum of these great works by Barber and Thompson.

Price: $27.98