Wigmore Hall
Schubert – Abendlied für die Entfernte, D 856
Beethoven – An die ferne Geliebte, op.98Rihm – Das Rot: Sechs Gedichte der Karoline von Günderrode
Schubert – Daß sie hier gewesen, D 775
Beethoven – Adelaide, op.46
Wonne der Wehmut, op.83 no.1
Neue Liebe, neues Leben, op.75 no.2
This was an impressive
recital from Simon Bode and Igor Levit. Levit’s participation had initially
promoted my attendance, but I left equally pleased to have made the
acquaintance of this fine German tenor. I cannot say that I find Schubert’s Abendlied für die Entfernte an example
of the composer at his most compelling, but it made for a pleasant enough
curtain-raiser, its progress nicely undulating – if, that is, hills or other
things that undulate can raise curtains. Bode’s head-voice was put to good use
in the hopes for blessed peace (sel’ge
Ruh) at the end of the second stanza, and Levit made the most of the turn
to the minor mode in the third.
Beethoven’s Lieder remain strangely neglected: more,
I suspect, a matter of outdated, tedious preconceptions about him supposedly
not being a ‘vocal composer’ than anything else. (The amount of nonsense one
still hears concerning even Fidelio
never ceases to surprise.) An die ferne
Geliebte is of course celebrated as ‘the first major song cycle’, but we
tend to hear it spoken of more than performed. Bode seemed really to speak to
us, his diction beyond reproach. Levit’s voicing showed what a difference it
makes to have a first-class pianist in this music. Both musicians offered
different ‘voices’, as it were, for different stanzas in the opening song, ‘Auf
dem Hügel sitz ich’. Bode’s brief withdrawal of vibrato in its successor, ‘Wo
die Berge so blau’ offered a vision of a very different world, motivated by the
text and vindicated in performance. Birds sang under Levit’s fingers in ‘Diese
Wolken in den Höhen’, but, echoing the Pastoral
Symphony and other Beethovenian evocations of Nature, this was not a vision
confined to the merely pictorial. Levit’s transition to the fifth song proved a
thing of musical wonder in itself, testament to the command of form one would
expect from his solo Beethoven performances. My sole reservation concerned
whether Bode shouted a little at the close of the cycle, but at any rate, there
was very much a sense of cyclic completion. (Beethoven, of course, helps in
that respect!) Later we heard an immediately recognisable ‘earlier Beethoven’
in a performance of Adelaide: echoes
of Mozart and Haydn, yet unmistakeably his own man, indeed even with
presentiments towards the close of Fidelio.
The performance of Neue Liebe, neues
Leben proved an object lesson for a fast tempo that was yet flexible and in
which the words were never garbled.
Rihm’s cycle, Das Rot: Sechs Gedichte der Karoline von
Günderrode was quite a revelation, offering an unanswerable refutation of
those silly claims one sometimes hears that Strauss (or X) was the last
composer of Lieder. The music sounds
both of a tradition and yet new: Hans Sachs would surely have nodded approval.
For, if the language is in general post-Schoenbergian – it could hardly be
pre-! – then there are undoubtedly pullings, sometimes even tonal pullings,
towards what came before. The musicians, perhaps Levit especially, made sense
of Rihm’s clearly musical forms. His melodic inspiration also came clearly to
the fore, Bode seeming equally at home with Rihm’s style. The opening ‘Hochrot’
offers a lengthy, somewhat Henze-like introduction. Nothing prepared us for the
shock of a violent piano chord just before the word ‘Tod’, yet it did not seem
arbitrary, making ultimate sense in verbal and musical context. ‘Des Knaben
Abendgruß’ was just as dramatic, perhaps still more so, Levit’s piano part –
and his despatch of it – virtuosic yet highly variegated. The pinpoint
precision and sheer physical impact of the piano part in the closing ‘Liebst du
das Dunkel’ left one in no doubt as to the calibre of Levit’s technique and
musicianship. One really experienced, through the contributions of both
musicians, the blood-rush and the pounding of the heart spoken of in the final
two lines to the cycle. An inspired decision to pause, holding off applause,
and yet to pursue the programme’s course into Schubert’s Daß sie hier gewesen led us initially in a strange yet welcoming
no-man’s-land between Rihm and Schubert. Wagner seemed to intervene, not least
through the extraordinary Tristan-esque
harmonies with which Schubert tantalises in that song.
