Inspired by the Romantic storyteller E. T. A. Hoffmann’s eccentric alter ego, Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana is a work Hélène Grimaud has known since she was a teenager and has recorded once before – yet, as she says, “you can spend a lifetime with a piece like this and always find something new”. In revisiting it here, she’s paired it with two pieces by Schumann’s protégé, Johannes Brahms, including a set of songs in which Brahms distilled his unrequited love for Schumann’s widow Clara, and for which Grimaud is partnered by sensational young baritone Konstantin Krimmel. The Extended Edition of her album For Clara complements pianist Hélène Grimaud’s recording of Schumann’s Kreisleriana and Brahm’s Op. 117 Intermezzi and Op. 32 songs with a recording of her 2022 performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Camerata Salzburg at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. The second movement, which is now available, gives a first impression of Hélène Grimaud performing one of the most widely recorded piano concertos from the Romantic period.

Baritone Konstantin Krimmel, voted ‘Best Newcomer’ of the year at the 2023 Oper! Awards in Germany and a member of the eminent Bavarian State Opera company since 2021, presents his third recording for Alpha Classics. In close partnership with pianist Daniel Heide, he places his artistry and his feeling for words at the service of the lied repertory. This is also an opportunity to discover his vision of the work, an unexpectedly contemporary, socio-psychological analysis: ‘ Die schöne Müllerin is a work that romanticises the development of a mental illness, and shows, unfiltered, how a young person can feel without a tempered emotional world. With all its dark sides.’

Following his acclaimed first recording for Alpha Classics, Saga, the German baritone Konstantin Krimmel continues to tell us stories, with a programme focusing on Zauberoper or ‘magic opera’. Accompanied by the Hofkapelle München orchestra conducted by Rüdiger Lotter, Krimmel explores operas by Mozart, Salieri and Gluck, alongside less well-known titles by Paul Wranitzky and Peter von Winter: spectacular musical comedies from the eighteenth-century Viennese repertory, with their enchanted fairytale universe.

The young German baritone Konstantin Krimmel won the prestigious Preis des Deutschen Musikwettbewerbs in 2019, in addition to the Helmut Deutsch Prize. He joins Alpha for a number of recordings, starting with this programme of lieder conceived with his longstanding partner, the pianist Doriana Tchakarova. This lover of words, a particularly expressive performer in concert, wanted to tell a story for his first album: he chose to record a selection of ballads, because they are genuine operas in just a few minutes… mini-sagas that permit great interpretative freedom. Among the great poets present here are Schiller, Goethe and Heinrich Heine.

Barthold Heinrich Brockes wrote a libretto on the Passion of Christ – based on the account in Matthew’s Gospel – which was set to music by many composers of his time, including Reinhard Keiser, Georg Philip Telemann and George Frideric Handel. It is Handel’s version of the latter that the period-instrument ensemble Arcangelo has chosen to present here. Under the direction of Jonathan Cohen, these specialists in the Baroque repertory are joined by the voices of Sandrine Piau, whose numerous Handel recordings are regarded as a benchmark, the tenor Stuart Jackson and the baritone Konstantin Krimmel, recently revealed in a debut recital for Alpha (Saga, ALPHA549). Together they resurrect the operatic splendour of a work that was first performed in 1719 and is thought to have influenced numerous passages of J. S. Bach’s St John Passion, written a few years later.