Fanny Hensel was Felix Mendelssohn's sister, a fact that goes unmentioned in the detailed booklet that accompanies this disc. The idea, no doubt, is to show that her music can stand on its own merits, and indeed it can. Hensel's style in general seems shaped along the lines of the small piano pieces heard here: her music is fantasy-like, often diverging into a distant key and finding a graceful, logical way back home. A few of her songs tie this quality effectively to the text and are as effective as any song Felix ever wrote. Hear her setting of Der holde Tal (The Beloved Valley), Goethe's six-line evocation of life's endless renewal: Hensel's music seems to bloom repeatedly as it moves from key to key in smoothly linked chains.
The chief attraction of this disc is not simply that it offers an introduction to Hensel's music, but also that it gives an extraordinary look at the creative processes of a composer of this period (around 1840). The 18 pieces included here constitute a travel album representing a yearlong trip to Italy taken by the composer and her husband, Berlin court painter Wilhelm Hensel. Fanny's published scores were accompanied by her husband's drawings of the places they had visited and that Fanny had evoked with her music. Thus we know not only what Fanny was seeing as she composed, but also in many cases whom she was with. This immensely valuable collection unites solo songs, duos, vocal quartets, and piano music under the aegis of a single creative impulse. Anyone with even a passing interest in Romanticism needs to hear this music.
The downside is that the performances here are a very mixed bag. No performer is unidiomatic, but one wishes that alto Ulrike Bartsch had a lighter touch in this basically domestic music, and that soprano
Dörthe Maria Sandmann took closer aim at the pitch. Pianist Philip Mayers' version of Hensel's Tarantella, Op. 6/4, is a German tarantella if ever there was one -- with more vigor and more of what
Astor Piazzolla used to call "mud" when rehearsing his players, the piece would be a worthy counterpart to the tarantella in Felix Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 4. Here's hoping that this album inspires more recordings of this unique set of works.