Samuel Hasselhorn’s first orchestral release, this album follows his inaugural instalment of the ambitious ‘Schubert 200 Project’ (Harmonia Mundi, 11/23). Die schöne Müllerin, which won the 2023 Diapason d’Or, launched the young baritone’s collaboration with the pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz to record all of the lieder penned by Schubert in his last five years, with the undertaking to culminate in the bicentennial of the composer’s death in 2028. Hasselhorn’s account of that song-cycle revealed a capacity to depict gradations of longing, despair and disillusionment that he pushes to further, even more impressive extremes on ‘Urlicht: Songs of Death and Resurrection’.

The shift from piano-based lieder to elaborately orchestrated art songs in the late Romantic era reflects such developments as the interplay between song and symphony pursued by Mahler and the tendency towards magnification, as Jean-François Boukobza remarks in his fine booklet essay. The programme Hasselhorn has put together also weaves a few opera excerpts into his playlist of orchestral songs, further suggesting the intermingling of large-scale public formats of symphony/opera with the more intimate, domestic sphere of the Schubertian lied. Still, the expressive, moment-by-moment immediacy that has become a signature of Hasselhorn’s interpretative style often encourages an illusion of confessions in private spaces.

Well-known Mahler songs are juxtaposed with rarities by Zemlinsky, Pfitzner and Braunfels, as well as arias from Humperdinck’s Königskinder and Korngold’s Die tote Stadt and – rather oddly – the duo in which Berg depicts Wozzeck’s murder of Marie (soprano Julia Grüter). The three Mahler lieder provide the connective tissue for Hasselhorn’s re-enactments of fin de siècle/early modernist obsessions and anxieties.

The versatile German singer shades the natural warmth and burnished resonance of his baritone to accentuate the different kinds of bitterness Mahler composes into ‘Revelge’ and ‘Um Mitternacht’ or the radiant yearning of the selections from Korngold and Zemlinsky. Sensitive, light-brushstroke playing from the Poznan´ Philharmonic under Łukasz Borowicz enhances his connection with the poetry and his meticulously thought-out phrasing.

But what seems to motivate Hasselhorn most is not the mere excursion into sometimes obscure music history. He conveys a conviction that these mostly dark visions offer a lens through which to view contemporary malaise. The result is to intensify those moments when light breaks through: in the title-track – one of Mahler’s Knaben Wunderhorn settings before it found its ultimate context in the Resurrection Symphony – in the last part of the Humperdinck aria or, at its most unsentimental, in the radiantly simple renunciation of the closing ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’.