Songs of myself

"This is a winner...Scholl projects [Oswald's] texts magnificently, drawing on an inexhaustible range of colours and moods. His instrumental ensemble...are deployed with imagination as well as with a restraint that reflects the very latest position of musicological research...The result is an absolute ear-opener." Editor's Choice Gramophone Mgazine May 2010

"Scholl seems fully at ease in this, his own musical heritage, which he delivers with a keen awareness of poetic shape and nuance, and of the fine line between speech and song in the nascent Lied." BBC Music Magazine, May 2010 ****

Few composers can have boasted quite such a colourful existence as the medieval poet and sometime diplomat Oswald von Wolkenstein. Having grown up in a Tyrolean castle, in a world recently ripped apart by the Black Death and immersed in religious and territorial conflict, Wolkenstein became something of a wandering knight with a complicated private life. If his travels greatly embellished the subject matter of his works they also enriched the musical form, as he incorporated French songs into the German style. A singer of warm humanity, Andreas Scholl's creamy and communicative countertenor voice has greatly endeared him to critics and public alike. This programme, the result of new research into von Wolkenstein, will feature previously unrecorded songs and instrumental arrangements.