Restless Love
A stroll though Romantic Leipzig – vocal music by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Marschner, Mühling, Steinacker, and Zöllner

amarcord (vocal ensemble)
Wolfram Lattke, Martin Lattke – tenor
Frank Ozimek – baritone
Daniel Knauft, Holger Krause – bass

Restless Love: searching, finding, singing

With its tenth CD production, amarcord takes a stroll through the musical Leipzig of the nineteenth century. Simultaneously, this anniversary release is a reverence to the hometown of the five world-class vocalists. They obviously feel very much at home in this repertoire, and the listener is accorded many a musical discovery in Restless Love.

Besides widely known songs from which they elicit new nuances by means of their just as fresh as knowledgeable creative will, eight of the titles appear for the first time on this CD, including a piece for male choir by Mendelssohn! The Weihgesang (Consecration Song) for Goethe’s funeral service was rediscovered by the Leipzig Mendelssohn researcher Ralf Wehner. Yet, besides the music of the then Gewandhaus music director Felix Mendelssohn and his friend Robert Schumann, it is exactly the today hardly known composers that make this CD so remarkable. This is music by Adolf Eduard Marschner, a relative of the crazy, brilliant Heinrich Marschner, who was also active in Leipzig – or the musical jewels by Carl Steinacker, August Mühling, and Carl Friedrich Zöllner, whose works have long been forgotten by the history of musical reception. Unjustly, for the songs of love and pain that amaracord has bundled together in Restless Love are without exception musical treasures.

Hardly surprising, for according to their own account, the amarcord singers agonized over the choice of the pieces, searching, finding, and singing them in restless love. „To be sure! These are for once real lieder, not gyrating, convoluted, and bespangled songs, without roar and bluster, without refined, polka-dotted crumbs of colorfully glued-together tatters of finicky addiction to originality.“ That which an unknown chronicler once wrote about Mühling’s songs can perhaps be best paraphrased as „natural Romanticism.“ Now, through amarcord, this music has finally found a home that is truly bound to be a reference.