Darkness by Thilo Dahlmann | Hedayet Djeddikar

Various composers

Thilo Dahlmann | Hedayet Djeddikar

Darkness

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: Challenge Classics
UPC: 0608917200294
Catnr: CC 720029
Release date: 20 March 2026
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1 CD	€ 19.95	Preorder

Label
Challenge Classics

UPC
0608917200294

Catalogue number
CC 720029

Release date
20 March 2026

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

Darkness explores the symbolic depth of the bass and baritone voice as a vessel for humanity’s most profound questions. Across works by Schumann, Wolf, Strauss, Martin and Brahms, the album traces a wide emotional and spiritual landscape shaped by themes of death, transience, loneliness, melancholy and, ultimately, transcendence. The programme opens with Schumann’s Requiem, added as a tribute to Nikolaus Lenau and placed at the beginning as a motto: a union of heaviness, longing and gentle, affirmative melancholy. From there, the journey unfolds through composers often writing at pivotal or final stages of their lives. Wolf’s Michelangelo Songs, composed shortly before his mental collapse, meditate on love, devotion and artistic melancholy; Strauss’s dark-hued songs reflect retreat, solitude and a wistful dissolution into nature; and Frank Martin’s Six Monologues from Jedermann plunge into the raw confrontation with death, charting a moral and spiritual transformation from terror to humility and faith. Together, these works reveal darkness not as mere despair, but as a space in which existential truth is sought.

Yet this album is not confined to shadow alone. In both Wolf and Brahms, the selected works bear witness to late creative phases in which despair is counterbalanced by reconciliation. Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge, written in anticipation of loss and drawing on biblical texts, move from stark reflections on mortality toward a final affirmation of love as the greatest human force, closing the circle begun with Schumann’s Requiem. Throughout the programme, sorrow is repeatedly transformed into acceptance, and fear into insight, illuminated by what the liner notes describe as a “gentle compositional light.” Darkness thus becomes a deeply human meditation: an artistic passage through emotional abysses toward consolation, spiritual clarity and an enduring sense of love that transcends life and death.

Dunkelheit erkundet die symbolische Tiefe der Bass- und Baritonstimme als Gefäß für die grundlegendsten Fragen der Menschheit. Anhand von Werken von Schumann, Wolf, Strauss, Martin und Brahms zeichnet das Album eine weite emotionale und geistige Landschaft nach, geprägt von Themen wie Tod, Vergänglichkeit, Einsamkeit, Melancholie und schließlich Transzendenz. Das Programm eröffnet mit Schumanns Requiem, als Hommage an Nikolaus Lenau hinzugefügt und bewusst an den Anfang gestellt wie ein Motto: eine Verbindung von Schwere, Sehnsucht und sanfter, bejahender Melancholie. Von dort entfaltet sich die Reise durch Komponisten, die häufig in entscheidenden oder letzten Phasen ihres Lebens schrieben. Wolfs Michelangelo-Lieder, kurz vor seinem geistigen Zusammenbruch entstanden, meditieren über Liebe, Hingabe und künstlerische Melancholie; Strauss’ dunkel gefärbte Lieder spiegeln Rückzug, Einsamkeit und ein wehmütiges Aufgehen in der Natur; und Frank Martins Sechs Monologe aus Jedermann stürzen in die rohe Konfrontation mit dem Tod und zeichnen eine moralische und spirituelle Wandlung von Schrecken zu Demut und Glauben nach. Gemeinsam zeigen diese Werke Dunkelheit nicht als bloße Verzweiflung, sondern als einen Raum, in dem existentielle Wahrheit gesucht wird.

Doch dieses Album verbleibt nicht allein im Schatten. Sowohl bei Wolf als auch bei Brahms zeugen die ausgewählten Werke von späten Schaffensphasen, in denen Verzweiflung durch Versöhnung ausgeglichen wird. Brahms’ Vier ernste Gesänge, in Erwartung des Verlustes geschrieben und auf biblische Texte zurückgreifend, führen von nüchternen Betrachtungen der Sterblichkeit zu einer abschließenden Bekräftigung der Liebe als größter menschlicher Kraft und schließen damit den Kreis, der mit Schumanns Requiem begonnen wurde. Im gesamten Programm verwandelt sich Trauer immer wieder in Annahme und Angst in Erkenntnis, erhellt von dem, was die Booklet-Texte als ein „sanftes kompositorisches Licht“ beschreiben. Dunkelheit wird so zu einer zutiefst menschlichen Meditation: einem künstlerischen Weg durch emotionale Abgründe hin zu Trost, geistiger Klarheit und einem bleibenden Gefühl von Liebe, die Leben und Tod überdauert.

Artist(s)

Thilo Dahlmann (bass-baritone)

After studying singing with Ulf Bästlein, Berthold Schmid, Guido Baehr and Wolfgang Millgramm at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, where he passed his concert exam with distinction in 2007, bassbaritone Thilo Dahlmann was a member of the International Opera Studio at the Zurich Opera House. He received important impulses there from the baritone Roland Hermann. Master classes with Charles Spencer, Michael Volle and Rudolf Piernay completed his artistic development, as did his collaboration with Carol Meyer-Bruetting.
He was awarded first prize at the North Rhine-Westphalia State Singing Competition. In 2013 he was awarded the Lied Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry of Culture and the Nikolaus Bruhns Singer Prize.
At Zurich Opera House he sang numerous smaller roles under conductors such as Franz Welser-Möst, Nello Santi and Philippe Jordan. Guest contracts have also taken him to the Deutsche Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf, the Wuppertaler Bühnen and the Theater Koblenz. His staged interpretation of the song cycle "Notturno" by Othmar Schoeck at the Theater Sankt Gallen received a broad and enthusiastic response from audiences and critics. Concert performances of Mozart's "Don Giovanni", "Parsifal" by Richard Wagner and Schreker's "Die Gezeichneten" took him to the Concertgebouw Amsterdam.
Above all, however, Thilo Dahlmann is active as a concert and lieder singer. If his repertoire ranges from early Baroque vocal music to numerous world premieres, the focus of his repertoire is on Bach, Handel and the great Romantic oratorio roles. These have led him under conductors such as Thomas Hengelbrock, Pieter Jan Leusink, Michael Alexander Willens, Jaap van Zweden, Christophe Rousset, Daniel Reuss, Frieder Bernius, Peter Neumann, Richard Mailänder, Hansjörg Albrecht, Christophe Rousset, Christoph and Andreas Spering in concert halls such as the Paris, Cologne and Essen Philharmonie, the Tonhalle Zurich, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden.
He has sung a wide repertoire of lieder with pianists such as Hedayet Djeddikar, Götz Payer, Ulrich Rademacher, Charles Spencer and Doriana Tchakarova.

He has been a guest at the Folle Journée in Nantes, Bilbao and Tokyo, the Halle Handel Festival, the Nuremberg Gluck Festival, the Leipzig Bach Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Aix-en-Provence Easter Festival and the Salzburg Festival, as well as at the opening concert of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg.
Radio (WDR; hr, SWR, NDR, France Musique, NHK, MDR) and television (Arte, ZDF, Mezzo-TV) recordings complement his artistic activities, as do CD and DVD recordings (Carus, cpo, querstand, DECCA). Accompanied by Charles Spencer, he recorded a solo debut CD with Schubert Lieder, which was released by the Viennese label Capriccio. Most recently, the Dutch label Challenge released a highly acclaimed CD of Thilo Dahlmann together with pianist Hedayet Djeddikar, on which they recorded songs by Johannes Brahms and Norbert Glanzberg.
In addition to his artistic activities, Thilo Dahlmann is professor of singing at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts and has taught at the Music Universities in Cologne, Frankfurt and Graz.

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Hedayet Jonas Djeddikar (piano)

Composer(s)

Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann was a German composer and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. He had been assured by his teacher Friedrich Wieck that he could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this dream. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing.
Schumann's published compositions were written exclusively for the piano until 1840; he later composed works for piano and orchestra; many Lieder (songs for voice and piano); four symphonies; an opera; and other orchestral, choral, and chamber works. Works such as Carnaval, Symphonic Studies, Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana, and the Fantasie in C are among his most famous. His writings about music appeared mostly in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), a Leipzig-based publication which he jointly founded.
In 1840, Schumann married Friedrich Wieck's daughter Clara, against the wishes of her father, following a long and acrimonious legal battle, which found in favour of Clara and Robert. Clara also composed music and had a considerable concert career as a pianist, the earnings from which, before her marriage, formed a substantial part of her father's fortune.
Schumann suffered from a mental disorder, first manifesting itself in 1833 as a severe melancholic depressive episode, which recurred several times alternating with phases of ‘exaltation’ and increasingly also delusional ideas of being poisoned or threatened with metallic items. After a suicide attempt in 1854, Schumann was admitted to a mental asylum, at his own request, in Endenich near Bonn. Diagnosed with "psychotic melancholia", Schumann died two years later in 1856 without having recovered from his mental illness.

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Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer is such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.
Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and by later writers, as both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Within his meticulous structures is embedded, however, a highly romantic nature.

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Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; his tone poems, including Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, and An Alpine Symphony; and other instrumental works such as Metamorphosen and his Oboe Concerto. Strauss was also a prominent conductor in Western Europe and the Americas, enjoying quasi-celebrity status as his compositions became standards of orchestral and operatic repertoire. Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.

Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; his tone poems, including Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, and An Alpine Symphony; and other instrumental works such as Metamorphosen and his Oboe Concerto. Strauss was also a prominent conductor in Western Europe and the Americas, enjoying quasi-celebrity status as his compositions became standards of orchestral and operatic repertoire.
Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.

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Hugo Wolf

Together with Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf can be considered as one of the greatest composers of Late Romantic lieder. Both of them followed the tradition of Schubert and Schumann, but intensified the gerne with Wagner's techniques of text declamation and harmonic development. What makes Wolf's song cycles special, is the fact that often they are devoted to a single poet, like in his Mörike-Lieder (1889), Eichendorff-Lieder (1889) en Goethe-Lieder (1890). For each cycle, he spent a considerable time studying the text to create the best matching music. His accomodation of musical structure, harmonic subteties and pianistic texture are all inseperable from the lyrics. Partly due to his psychological sophistication his songs can be heard as miniature operas.
Even though he did start writing on several full-fledged operas, it never became a true succes. Only his opera Der Corregidor (1896) was completed. Things went downhill from there. In 1897, Wolf had a nervous breakdown as a consequence of a syphilis infection he had since his teens. After a failed suicide attempt, he was admitted to a clinic in Vienna. The somber Michelangelo-Lieder (1898) would become his last completed composition. Wolf died in 1903, three weeks before his 43st birthday.