Both Strauss’s ‘Elektra’ and Stravinsky’s ‘Oedipus Rex’ trace their lineages back to Sophocles, the Greek dramatist who lived in the fourth century BC. Both are stories of the avenging of a royal father’s murder, either by surviving family members (‘Elektra’) or by Fate or the gods themselves (‘Oedipus Rex’). Even from an early age, Georg […]

‘You sing as if you had written it yourself!’ Jean Cocteau once told Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. This anthology of lieder by Brahms and Schumann is a prime example of the great singer doing just that, mining every nuance of emotion from a song while, at the same time, sounding as spontaneous and free as if he […]