Jard van Nes and Robert Holl are two voices which go down particularly well in England; but their visits are all too rare and this Dutch recording, made all of three years ago, is welcome for both its casting and for its thoughtfully balanced programming.
Van Nes has a warm mahogany mezzo, firm and even in its lower reaches, yearning, and slow to open out at the top. She sings all the way through every vowel in a distinctively sensuous legato which emphasizes Mahler's claustrophobically hugging setting of word to note, note to instrumental colour in the Ruckert songs. Some may find the timbres and intensity just too unrelieved—there is certainly room for brighter expansion at the end of ''Um Mitternacht''—but this is a deeply considered reading.
I found Holl's Brahms marginally more interesting; his rich, dense bass has a healthy, energetic baritone range which he uses to point and give momentum to the phrasing of the first of the Ernste Gesange, and to bring the fourth out into the light with bright, strong vowels. The full weight and ballast of the voice is exploited in the restrained cantabile of the second song; yet it moves nimbly enough in the last, and is superbly focused in the third.
The Gelders Orkest, an ensemble of 72 from Arnhem, are put through their paces in short preludes to the groups of songs. For Mahler, there is ''Blumine'', the second of the First Symphony's original five movements, showing the mellow sturdiness of its string section and the character of its woodwind; for Brahms, Erich Leinsdorf's orchestration of two of the choral preludes pushes wind and brass to their limits in strenuous imitation of a romantic organ, keyboard, pipes, pedals and all.
Yoav Talmi conducts conscientiously, but there are times when one could wish for a clearer, more ventilated acoustic.'