Hartmut Höll

Among the post-Gerald Moore, post-Geoffrey Parsons accompanists, Hartmut Höll has attracted attention like a collaborator along with his own ideas about singer/accompanist partnerships. Along with his wife, mezzo soprano Mitsuko Shirai, and with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau through the final many years of the baritone’s very long career, Höll offers demonstrated an frequently grittier approach, even though some critics possess felt him much less refined than his predecessors. Höll, non-etheless, shows a readiness to explore the external edges from the melody literature, frequently getting into new concentrate lyric functions by minimal, or much less well-known, composers. On the Stuttgart Conservatory, where Höll was seeking his research in the 1970s, he fulfilled his potential wife. Shirai, though blessed in Japan, acquired acquired great service in German and her curiosity about literature seduced the activist character of the youthful pianist. As students of composer/accompanist Hermann Reutter, Höll was afforded the chance of portion as accompanist for professional classes being distributed by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. The fantastic vocalist was impressed by both Höll’s function on her behalf classes and by his shows with Shirai. In the first ’80s, Höll found the interest of another great lieder musician and became Fischer-Dieskau’s regular accompanist. He continued to be using the baritone for 14 years, offering probing and conscientious support amidst Fischer-Dieskau’s periodic tasks with concert pianists much less adept at cooperation. In recordings and one extant video, Höll shows great spontaneity, confirming the conclusions of the article writer in The Christian Research Monitor that he’s a pianist “of spiky originality and great psychological depth.” Through a considerable group of recordings for the Capriccio label, Höll provides had the opportunity to explore with Shirai both regular and not-so-standard repertory. Mozart and Brahms had been each treated to close re-examination in discs stated in the 1990s. A good example of clean exploration was noticed in the 1991 discharge 2x Winterreise, where the vocalist and accompanist performed the routine on one disk, while on the various other Höll performed the accompaniment towards the violin playing of Tabea Zimmermann and readings from the text messages by Peter Härtling. Additional composers whose tracks have been documented by Höll and Shirai consist of Robert Franz, Viktor Ullman, Hugo Wolf, Alban Berg, Reutter, Hanns Eisler, and Karl Michael Komma.