Herring’s arrangement of Dichterliebe for voice and guitar gives a whole new life to the work as an intimate, direct communication with the listener rather than a performance. Kyle’s tenor is occasionally taxed audibly by the challenge but he interprets the words with intelligence. Mertz’s settings for guitar alone sound, by contrast, pleasant but pedestrian.4/5 stars. By Classical Music Magazine
Tenor and guitarist bring a whole new dimension to Schumann’s Heine cycle.Now before you laugh, there is at least one precedent here: Peter Schreier and classical guitarist Konrad Ragossnig’s Die schöne Müllerin. And boy does that work. But Schumann, who thought so pianistically?It’s not only to the credit of guitarist Carl Herring, whose skilful arrangements - played equally skilfully - these are, that so much of this also works; Kevin Kyle, with his light, unaffected tenor, brings a youthful earnestness to Heine’s poems that, in combination with the sound of plucked strings, adds a whole new, almost folk-like, dimension to this most beloved of song-cycles.This is most evident where the songs themselves are most delicate: certainly “In wunderschönen Monat Mai” but also in “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen”. It’s only in those songs where you really need the meat-and-potatoes of a baritone and piano - “Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome” or “Ich grolle nicht”, to cite two obvious examples - that the shortcomings of the present combination present themselves. More seriously, an overall conception of the unfolding emotional and psychological drama - such as you hear with Gérard Souzay and Dalton Baldwin or Eberhard Wächter and Alfred Brendal - seems to be lacking.As a filler, Herring plays six Schubert arrangements for solo classical guitar by one of Schumann’s contemporaries, Johann Kaspar Mertz (1806-56). As Herring points out in his notes - in which, alas, he occasionally resorts to hyperbole in order to bolster his arguments - they are indeed influenced by Liszt’s own transcriptions of the same songs; and while less overtly virtuoso, they have an irresistible charm all on their own. As does, ultimately, this surprisingly successful recording.
By Gramophone Magazine 2009