Every Friday we choose a monitor from a Naxos Music Group album launched twenty years in the past to supply the accompaniment for 5 minutes of your downtime.
This week’s decide from the Oehms Classics label (OC571) is Robert Schumann’s dramatic, declamatory setting of a poem by Heinrich Heine, Belsazar (Belshazzar). The track relates the biblical story of the proud Babylonian King Belshazzar who desecrated the sacred vessels of Jehovah and to whom there appeared writing on the wall that he couldn’t perceive – an in poor health omen for the one who learn it. The final line is ready as a distanced epilogue with its ultimate disclosure: Belshazzar’s dying by the hand of his personal servant.
