Reinecke: Dornröschen and Kinderlieder – Kreutz

Somewhere in the vast, unglamorous middle of the nineteenth-century German musical bourgeoisie there existed an entire domestic industry of cantatas meant to be sung by young ladies in drawing rooms, accompanied by a long-suffering piano and the indulgent smiles of aunts. Carl Reinecke understood that world from the inside. He was, after all, the model of the respectable Kapellmeister — three decades at the helm of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, a pedagogue whose students’ names now dwarf his own reputation (Grieg, Bruch, Stanford, Svendsen — an astonishing roll call for a composer most people know, if at all, for a flute sonata named after a water sprite).

Dornröschen, op. 139, will not overturn that reputation, nor should it try to. This is Sleeping Beauty refracted through the polite haze of Biedermeier taste — Mendelssohn’s fingerprints everywhere, a little Schumannesque harmonic wistfulness in the inner voices, nothing that would frighten a horse or trouble a censor. And yet, heard complete and without condescension, it has real charm, real craft, and one truly inspired stroke: a pair of flies. Yes — flies, buzzing around the sleeping court in their own small scene, providing exactly the kind of puckish comic relief that keeps the piece from curdling into treacle. It’s a lovely dramaturgical instinct, oddly Mendelssohnian in itself — one thinks of the mechanicals in the Midsummer Night’s Dream music, shrunk down to insect scale.

The interpretation here does what this repertoire actually requires, which is harder than it sounds: restraint without stiffness. Catalina Bertucci sings Dornröschen with a bright, unforced soprano that never oversells the pathos of the sleeping princess — she has the sense, rare among young singers tackling this kind of quasi-fairy-tale material, to let the melodic line simply unfold rather than underline it with feeling. Gerhild Romberger, covering both the Wicked Fairy and the Spinning-Woman and the narrating “Sage von Dornröschen,” brings a grainy, dark-grained alto that gives the piece its necessary shadow — without her, the whole confection would float away. Markus Köhler’s Prince arrives late, as princes do, but his baritone has enough weight and burnish to justify the wait; the change of vocal color when he enters is genuinely welcome, a structural device Reinecke clearly knew what he was doing with.

Pianist Peter Kreutz deserves the real credit here — not just for playing with the kind of unfussy clarity this music wants (attacks clean, pedaling light, phrasing that breathes with the singers rather than plowing through them), but for apparently being the animating force behind resurrecting the score at all. That’s the sort of unglamorous archival labor that rarely gets its due. Without someone like Kreutz, scores like this simply molder in libraries — worthy of a footnote in a Grove entry, never heard.

The seven Kinderlieder that fill out the disc are slighter still, drawn from opus numbers spanning decades of Reinecke’s career, and wisely the producers alternate soprano and mezzo soloists so the ear doesn’t grow weary of one timbre repeating itself over eleven minutes of unpretentious strophic tunes. These are lullabies and nursery scenes, nothing more — but “nothing more” executed with taste is its own small virtue, and too often modern singers bring an operatic vibrato to this kind of material that curdles it instantly. No such mistake here.

Is any of this indispensable? No. There’s no lost masterpiece hiding in Reinecke’s cantata output waiting to be reinstated alongside Elijah or the Schumann song cycles. But indispensability isn’t the only currency a record can trade in. This disc restores a small, genuine pleasure to circulation — unpretentious music, well served, sung by artists who understand that the highest compliment you can pay this repertoire is to not try too hard. Girls’ choirs and college voice programs looking for repertoire beyond the same tired anthologies of Fauré and Brahms partsongs would do well to investigate — Dornröschen would stage beautifully, informally, in exactly the kind of intimate setting it was born for. A minor discovery, warmly and intelligently presented. Worth an evening, worth a smile, worth the modest outlay.