Back to Liederland

The world of Lieder is, to quote A.E. Housman, a 'land of lost content', full of 'happy highways' and not quite so happy highways where we 'cannot come again'. That is unless you're Thomas Larcher, the Austrian-born composer, whose new disc is out on Harmonia Mundi. I first heard Larcher's work at Wigmore Hall in 2011, including a song cycle he had written for one of my favourite singers, Mark Padmore. Setting texts by Hans Aschenwald and Alois Hotschnig, A Padmore Cycle offers a aphoristic if not fragmentary trip back into the mountains and valleys that are so familiar from Schubert, Brahms and Mahler's Lieder. Larcher echoes their musical and literary tropes, though everything is placed at an eerie distance, due, according to one of Aschenwald's poems, to the 'hunger for a homeland that no longer is one'. The parallels with Mahler will doubtless be further emphasised when A Padmore Cycle is premiered in an orchestral version with the BBC Symphony Orchestra next season, though I personally love the fragility of the version captured on this superb disc. Click here to order a copy.

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