Morike Lieder

"This important new recording, with its illuminating essays and commentaries, can stand proudly for the present and the futureas abenchmark in its own right."
***** Five Stars BBC Music Magazine (Jan 2002)

'Abiding satisfaction in hearing the Mörike Liederbuch at one spellbinding session … a cornerstone for any Wolf collection. And pure radiant joy heaped high on silver platters' (Fanfare)

'A major achievement on the part of its three artists … this becomes a straightforward top recommendation' (Gramophone)

This distinguished set brings together all of Hugo Wolf's so-called 'Mörike' Lieder, the first of the great songbooks on which the composer's reputation rests. Eduard Mörike was the author of poetic idylls and delightful fairytales, a bucolic, charmingly inadequate and ineffectual country clergyman at one with his surroundings, and a nature poet par excellence with an engaging sense of humour. His poems inspired Wolf to write some of his most popular, enduring, and endearing songs, though there are many in the collection which are not as well-known as they should be. Astoundingly, all 53 were written within a few months in 1888.
Soprano Joan Rodgers was appointed a CBE by Her Majesty the Queen in the 2001 New Year's Honours list, and Stephan Genz was, of course, the recipient of a Gramophone Award for his Hyperion CD of Beethoven songs with Roger Vignoles. Together with Roger, our two singers bring these delectable songs to life as never before.

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Stephan Genz was born in 1973 in Erfurt, Germany, and received his first musical training as a member of St Thomas's Boys' Choir in Leipzig. He studied at the Hochschule für Music und Theater in Leipzig with Hans-Joachim Beyer, and from 1994 with Mitsuko Shirai and Hartmut Höll at the State Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe. Stephan Genz has also studied with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
Mr Genz has won first prizes and special awards at several international singing competitions including the Johannes Brahms Competition in Hamburg in 1994 and the International Hugo Wolf Competition in Stuttgart. He has broadcast for Deutsche Well, Hessischen Rundfunk, Südwestfunk and the BBC. He has also given song recitals and concerts in Paris, Montreux, Amsterdam, Lausanne, Rennes and America, and appeared at the opera houses of Lausanne, Rennes and Paris (Bastille). He made his highly acclaimed London debut at Wigmore Hall in 1997.