The Prince Consort - Other Love Songs - Gramophone

For all Brahms’s melodic and rhythmic inventiveness in his Liebesliederwaltzes, anyone who listens to the two sets straight through risks overdosing on triple-time Viennese Gem¸tlichkeit. Stephen Hough’s cycle Other Love Songs, commissioned by The Prince Consort as a companion to the Liebeslieder, makes an ideal contrasting centrepiece. 

Hough avowedly avoided poems about romantic heterosexual love to explore other kinds of love: filial love, gay love, divine love, love in defiance of racial prejudice. Drawing on poetic sources from St John’s Gospel to AE Housman and Langston Hughes, the songs range eclectically from cabaret-style numbers to the Indian exoticism of ìKashmiri Songî. The performers, including Hough himself as one of the pianists, do them proud. Soprano Anna Leese, bright and vibrant of tone, rises poignantly to the impassioned climax of ìKashmiri Songî, while mezzo Jennifer Johnston, singing in broad Scouse, offers a delightful comic cameo as the feisty maid in ìMadam and her Madamî.

The Liebeslieder are enjoyable, too, with a splendid bite in the more vigorous numbers, although in their determination to avoid any hint of sentimentality the performers can be a touch prosaic, as in the serene hymn to the muses that closes the Neue Liebeslieder. The forward recording of the voices means that true soft singing, here and elsewhere, is at a premium. Still, if the rival versions by Barbara Bonney, Anne Sofie von Otter et al (EMI, 10/95) and a vocal quartet led by soprano Marlis Petersen (Harmonia Mundi, 11/07) are rather more beguilingly sung and shaped, with a subtler use of rubato, these fresh and direct performances have much to commend them. A clinching factor may well be the Hough songs, acerbically witty and deeply touching by turns, and culminating in the ethereal lullaby of ìSimon, Son of Johnî.