Anna Prohaska I & Pierre-Laurent Aimard I

Charles Ives wrote 151 songs – far more than are contained in his collection 114 Songs, self-published in 1922. Many of these were originally set “for a solo instrument instead of a singing voice,” as “songs without words,” because the singers “always kept going on about the intervals, time signatures etc.” (Ives). Their stylistic diversity is astonishing – ranging from the unmistakable influence of European antecedents to ragtime und jazz syncopations – while the spectrum of texts on which they are based stretches from sentimental ballads to profound philosophical relections. Alongside highly virtuosic piano parts full of dissonances (“Does a song always have to be a song?” said Ives) there are also simple accompaniments, though even the apparently conventional songs present numerous surprises in terms of harmonics, rhythm and articulation. Anna Prohaska, famous for her almost weightless, silver clear soprano will perform a selection of 25 of Ives’s 114 Songs together with Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Grouped by theme, they are juxtaposed with works that include Igor Stravinsky’s folkloric Four Russian Songs and Claude Debussy’s Proses lyriques, in which introspective miniatures meet dramatic scenes in a Wagnerian manner. Within them the restrained colours of the keyboard transform musically into a thick, quasi-orchestral stream of sound that provides the requisite sonic foundation for the passions described in the lyrics.