Kost/Fueter - Rea Claudia Kost sings Hanns Eisler and Barbara

For me his setting was what performance would be for a play: the test. He reads with enormous exactitude', wrote Bertolt Brecht in his work diary on July 26, 1942, thus paying Hanns Eisler a subtle compliment that he never lavished on any other of his musical contemporaries. At this time, the two artists were in Hollywood, having emigrated to California to escape the Nazis. Eisler received more and more commissions to earn a living: during his ten-year exile in the USA, he was twice nominated for Oscar film music awards. Besides the bread-and-butter commissions, this period also saw him write the 'Hollywood Songbook', which includes 28 Brecht settings as well as the Holderlin Fragments, thus encompassing a vast range of musical and literary styles. The present recording covers the cosmos of Eisler's song art in all its scope.