Thomas Erlank and Tinus Botha bring Wagner, Vaughan Williams and Richard Strauss into dialogue in a new Da Vinci Classics recording, scheduled for October 2027.

In song, a poem acquires a second sense of time. A phrase can linger over a word, an accompaniment can preserve an image after the voice has fallen silent, and a return of musical material can make the past audible again. Mortal Echoes, forthcoming from Da Vinci Classics in October 2027, brings this intimate relationship between poetry and music into focus through works by Richard Wagner, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Richard Strauss.

Tenor Thomas Erlank and pianist Tinus Botha, colleagues at South Africa’s North-West University, have chosen three groups of songs with distinct poetic worlds: Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder, Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, and Strauss’s Vier Lieder, Op. 27.

Wagner’s five settings of poems by Mathilde Wesendonck bring the concentrated scale of the Lied into contact with the expressive intensity associated with his musical theatre. Longing, stillness and the desire to escape ordinary time give these songs a particular inwardness. The musical line continually tests the boundary between an individual utterance and a larger, unfolding dramatic thought.

In On Wenlock Edge, Vaughan Williams turns to six poems from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Landscape becomes inseparable from human experience: wind, distance and the sounds of a familiar place frame reflections on love, absence and lives already past. The cycle, composed in 1909, gives the programme an English poetic and musical perspective alongside the two German composers.

Strauss’s Op. 27 offers another scale of intimacy. Dedicated to Pauline de Ahna in 1894, its four songs move between inward reflection and an expansive declaration of feeling. Their collection brings together Ruhe, meine Seele!, Cäcilie, Heimliche Aufforderung and Morgen!, each approaching the relationship between voice and poetic image in a different way.

Mortal Echoes places these works beside one another without dissolving their differences. For Erlank and Botha, the programme provides a meeting point for German Lied and English song, with the partnership between singer and pianist at the centre of the musical argument.

Explore the forthcoming recording and programme ↗

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