Chansons Francaises

For me,' Wolfgang Holzmair once remarked, 'the song is a continuation of speech - a higher form of expressing words and thoughts.' Over the course of three decades, the Austrian baritone has been true to his own belief in a stream of recitals and recordings of the Lieder, chanson and art-song repertoire. As recently as 2012 his album of Mahler's songs from Des knaben Wunderhorn was welcomed in Gramophone for his superb word-painting, 'replacing sheer vocal power with more Lieder-friendly qualities of agility, precision and nuance. Poetic narrative is everywhere apparent.'