Previously, soprano Fatma Said’s latest albums, El Nour and Kaleidoscope crossed cultures and musical genres, her new album Lieder instead focuses on German-language songs of the Romantic era: lieder by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.
Fatma has immersed herself in lieder since she was 18, having attended German-speaking schools in her birth city of Cairo, she became a student at the Hanns Eisler Conservatory in Berlin. “Ever since then, the joy of singing this genre has been central to my musical life,” she writes, “I am very passionate about lieder … This wonderful combination of great German poetry and genius composers like Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms.” In the conventional course of things, a lieder recital involves one singer and one pianist, but Fatma Said takes a characteristically imaginative approach with this album. “I’ve always wanted to make music with friends,” she continues, “When you share similar artistic values, the performances are on a very special level.”
