It's not for nothing that 1840 is thought of as Schumann's "year of the Lied": Dichterliebe, Frauen-Liebe und Leben , the two great Liederkreis – Heine and Eichendorff – as well as a number of other cycles came to be, plus this Myrten, which was written as a wedding gift for Clara Wieck. The 26 Lieder are in fact not connected by any organic link: rather, they are like a crown made of 26 flowers, all essentially different, all displaying the immense diversity of the composer's art in the domain of the Lied, running from a traveller's scrapbook – in the Orientalist texts of Goethe's West–östlicher Divan , Burns's Scotland or Venice with its gondolieri – to the more domestic and familial, by way of ambiguous moments evoking the Lotusblume (lotus flower) or the bucolic air of Germany. Soprano Diana Damrau and baritone Iván Paley, accompanied on the piano by Stephan Matthias Lademann, share the score, each choosing Lieder which best fit their voice – without any transposition; all the original tonalities are retained. Because, while the texts aren't necessarily organically connected to one another, the transition from one Lied to the next is strongly structured, and any modifications would break the tonal balance. Moreover, the alternation between male and female voices really puts the accent on the feminine-masculine aspect of the cycle, and it avoids any monotony. This is a very fine production indeed. © SM/Qobuz