Wigmore Hall
Fauré:
Aurore, op.39 no.1; Poème d’un jour, op.2; Automne,
op.18 no.3; Brahms: O kühler Wald, op.72 no.3; Die Mainacht, op.43 no.2; Auf dem Kirchhofe, op.105 no.4; Feldeinsamkeit, op.86 no.2; Alte Liebe, op.72 no.1; Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen, op.32 no.2; Willst du, dass ich geh? op.71 no.4; Schumann: Kerner Lieder, op.35
Stéphane Degout (baritone)
Simon Lepper (piano)
Another wonderful Wigmore song
recital: this time from Stéphane Degout – recently shining in George Benjamin’s
new operatic masterpiece, Lessons
in Love and Violence – and Simon Lepper. We began with Fauré, whose
songs alas often leave me cold. (I have little doubt the fault lies with me.)
Such was not the case here, however. Perhaps I have at long last found the key
to the door: I do hope so. That Degout was fully in command of an often elusive
– and not only to non-Francophone artists – idiom might have been expected;
that I was put in mind of the mastery, rather than any specifics, of a Gérard
Souzay had me realise from the off that these would be no ordinary
performances. Lepper, in the opening Aurore,
captured just the right sort of ‘floating’ tone to the piano part too, the
composer’s harmonic subtleties suspended. Surpassing elegance here and in the
following Poème d’un jour did not
preclude death (of the stars) at the close but rather proved its agent. Turbulence
and torment naturally marked Toujours
– the sequence was splendidly programmed – albeit within a similar yet far from
identical framework. Lepper was permitted in its final stanza a hint at
Lisztian pianism, which he gratefully took – and communicated. Fauré sometimes
puts me in mind of Elgar; for me, it was an almost Elgarian dignity that
characterised the prelude to Adieu,
even though chronologically that was the wrong way around. Automne offered a nice link to Brahms, the music darkening, the
crucial role for the piano bass line brought out without exaggeration. A
perfect sadness in its final line – Où jadis sourit ma jeunesse! – sounded not
un-Wagnerian. Is it fanciful to hope for an Amfortas some day…?
There is certainly no problem
with Degout’s German: clean and meaningful as his musical line. The dark
simplicity of Brahms’s O kühler Wald mirrored
that forest itself. Darker shadows (‘dunklere Schatten’) were sought and found
in Die Mainacht, providing relief for
its premonition of the soprano solo movement in Ein deutsches Requiem. Brief, unmistakeably late, inner tumult
characterised Auf dem Kirchhofe, even
before its chorale reference: ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’. It is a
different, yet not entirely unrelated Einsamkeit
– and certainly was in performance – that we heard in Feldeinsamkeit. As ever, Degout’s reserves of breath seemed
endless. Alte Liebe seemed almost to
reminisce about Schubert, retaining consciousness that reminiscence was now all
that was possible: old love indeed. Darker, still more Romantic, Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen seemed almost
– whether I am sentimentalising or not – to speak of Brahms’s passion for Clara
Schumann. And it was a Brahmsian echo of Schubert’s Winterreise crow that seemed to hover over Willst du, dass ich geh? It may have ended in the major mode, but
it was hardly affirmative. Brahms’s ‘lateness’ spoke for itself, here and
elsewhere; it neither needed nor received underlining.
Schumann (Robert, that is) had
the second half: his Kerner Lieder,
op.35. It was a stormy night indeed with which the set opened, thus picking up tendencies
from both Fauré and Brahms, yet also turned us towards new paths – or Neue Bahnen, as someone, I believe, once
put it. The ambiguity of its close seemed almost to open a new door for us;
there was certainly no reason not to follow its hint. An illumined quality to
the following ‘Stirb, Lieb’ und Freud’!’ proved spellbinding, never quite
permitting one to put a finger on the source of that light: artistry indeed. Muffled bells sounded not only on the line in
question (‘Alsbald der Glocken dumpfer Klang’), but subliminally throughout, prefiguring
in context the ambiguous swagger of ‘Wanderlied’. Schumannesque sadness was
captured to a tee in ‘Erstes Grün’, nowhere more so than in Lepper’s piano
rubato, although not only there. A forest path took on metaphysical meaning too
in ‘Sehnsucht nach der Waldgesang’, whilst ‘Auf das trinkglas eines
verstorbenes Freundes’ seemed already to revisit past joys: the song of travel
heard, as it were, through the aural lens of ‘Erstes Grün’, prior to the
magical moonlight of the final stanza. It seemed as if the question of ‘Frage’
was posed without ever having arisen. Be that as it may, ‘Stille Tränen’ quite
rightly offered the emotional climax. Relief and repose of a sort, in ‘Wer
machte dich so krank’, again hinted at a hushed awe not so distant from Parsifal, an impression of holy ground
furthered in ‘Alte Laute’. If only an angel might have woken the narrator (‘Und
aus dem Traum, dem bangen, weckt mich ein Engel nur’), what if that angel were
actually singing? Such perhaps was the thought that made the appreciative
audience so reluctant to break rapt silence at its close.
Brahms’s Lerchengesang, op.70 no.2, seemed very much to come ‘after’
Schumann’s set. Degout and Lepper offered it as an encore that was beautiful in
the very best sense: rare, painful, the opening of a new path to something
else, something deeper.
