Goerne/Schmalcz - Brahms, 26 April 2018

Wigmore Hall

Neun Lieder und Gesänge, op.32; Sommerabend, op.85 no.1; Mondenschein, op.85 no.2; Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, op.96 no.1; Es schauen die Blumen, op.96 no.3; Meerfahrt, op.96 no.4; Vier ernste Gesänge, op.96 no.4

Matthias Goerne (baritone)

Alexander Schmalcz (piano)

At his best, Matthias Goerne does serious (ernst) at least as well as anyone else. He may not be everyone’s first choice as Papageno, although what he brings to the role is compelling indeed, quite different from the blithe clowning of some, arguably much closer to its fundamental sadness. (Is that not, after all, what clowns are about?)  Yet, individual taste aside, whom would one choose before him to sing Brahms, let alone the Four Serious Songs?

That set came last in this Wigmore Hall recital from Goerne and Alexander Schmalcz. Whilst it is difficult to imagine anyone having been seriously disappointed by the performance heard, I do not think it came close to matching a performance I heard last year in Salzburg from Goerne with Daniil Trifonov. Before hastening to judgement, however, I should caution that the fault did not necessarily lie with the pianist. Here, as indeed throughout, Schmalcz gave estimable accounts of Brahms’s musical structures, duly suggestive of both how they complement and how they do not the ways of the verbal texts. ‘Denn est gehet dem Menschen’ was perhaps the strongest performance here, offering a true sense of having reached the beginning of the end, finality clear even in the fury of its central stanza; ‘Es fährt alles an einen Ort…’. Echoes from Ein deutsches Requiem, always apparent, were perhaps more than usually so here. However, during the second and fourth songs in particular, a hectoring quality to Goethe’s performance, sometimes apparent earlier too, seemed to go a little too far in the role of the verbal Preacher (be it that of Ecclesiastes or St Paul). In the latter and final song, ‘Wenn ich met Menschen,’ there was a sense of the music never quite having settled; it seemed unduly complicated, as if minds of singer and pianist had not truly come together.

The Neun Lieder und Gesänge, op.32, fared much better. Why we do not hear these songs more often I really do not know. Perhaps it is simply that Brahms is still thought of more as an instrumental than a vocal composer. Surely the autobiographical element – Graham Johnson once suggested considering the set as a Komponistenliebe sequel to Schumann’s Dichterliebe – should attract. Above all, though, the sheer musical – and musico-dramatic – quality should. Wagner’s was not the only way. Schubert often hovered in the background, more oppressively than benignly, the opening ‘Wie raft ich mich auf in der Nacht’ suggestive almost of a retelling of the night of ‘Der Doppelgänger’, from a different, related person’s standpoint, several years later. Indeed that fabled ‘lateness’ of Brahms, however much it may stand in need of deconstruction, seemed, not inappropriately, present throughout this dark night’s proceedings. That is not to say that darkness was unvaried; it nevertheless predominated, still more so in the following ‘Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen’. ‘Ich schleich umher’ offered different forms of repression, repression remaining the operative word, however. Two August von Platen storms ensued, prior to a true sense of reckoning in another setting of that same poet, ‘Du sprichst, dass ich mich täuschte’, almost as if this were the cycle’s – if indeed a cycle it be – peripeteia. Hafiz, translated by Georg Friedrich Daumer followed, in three songs, the first two exquisitely bitter in their ‘Süsse’ (‘sweetness’, as the first has it) – or should that be the other way around? Blissful in its quiet ecstasy, ‘Wie bist du meine Königin’ seemed to hark back to Schubert’s ‘Du bist die Ruh’, without abdicating its ‘late’ knowledge that it would prove impossible to return.

Five Heine settings came in between. (There was no interval.) ‘Sommerabend’ benefited from especially fine piano voicing, as if shadowing the vocal line, a Doppelgänger to it, which in a way it is, yet not only in a ‘purely musical’ way. ‘Mondenschein’ proved in turn a moonlit Doppelgänger to its predecessor. The exquisite drowsiness of death and recollection, quite without hope of an after-life or any other ‘beyond’, came to us in the deathly ‘Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht’. An intermezzo-like reading – from both artists – of ‘Es schauen die Blumen’ was followed by a somewhat hectoring ‘Meerfahrt’. Perhaps that was the point – up to a point. Sometimes, however, as Heine might have advised, there are other forms of preparation than rage.

Goerne/Schmalcz - Schubert, 20 September 2009

Wigmore Hall

Nacht und Träume
Der blinde Knabe
Hoffnung
Die Sterne
Im Abendrot

Totengräbers Weise
Greisengesang
Tiefes Leid
Totengräbers Heimweh

An den Mond
Die Mainacht
An Silvia
Ständchen
Der Schäfer und der Reiter

Die Sommernacht
Erntelied
Herbstlied
Jägers Abendlied
Der liebliche Stern
An die Geliebte

Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Alexander Schmalcz (piano)

One is hardly more likely to associate light relief with Matthias Goerne than with Pierre Boulez, though for somewhat different reasons. This was not an occasion to buck the trend. Having said that, this was not so dark a recital as that of Wolf and Liszt he recently gave in Salzburg with Andreas Haefliger. Intelligently programmed as ever, the second of Goerne’s two present Wigmore Hall Schubert recitals presented songs of night, sorrow, and the grave but also songs of the stars, the harvest, and dreams. Melancholy and occasional joy accompanied old age and death. Slow songs were preponderant in the first half, whilst the second brought greater variation, a broadening of horizons.

To open a recital with Nacht und Träume was a bold move: one that paid off handsomely. A wondrous introduction to the recital as a whole was provided by its hushed expectancy, not least thanks to the steadfast rocking – something of a contradiction in terms, I know – of Alexander Schmalcz’s piano part. Hope of sorts coloured Der blinde Knabe and Hoffnung. The blind boy’s happiness with or resignation to his lot – he knows nothing of the sun and its setting, so cannot truly regret it – was poignant indeed, especially in the final stanza, whilst Schubert’s brand of hope in the latter Schiller setting proved to be of the flickering variety: no Beethovenian flame here. Schmalcz intelligently highlighted the extraordinary proto-Lisztian harmony of the introduction and interlude to Friedrich Schlegel’s Die Sterne, whilst Goerne’s response to the text illuminated like the stars themselves. A single telling example was the floated melisma upon ‘himmlischen’, noting the heavenly nature of the signs at which we marvel. In a rapt account of Im Abendrot, the rise and fall of the words and musical structure was expertly shaped.

The second group of the first half was that concerned with the grave. Goerne’s pale, deathly tone brought out the reality (‘Wirklichkeit’, in Rückert’s verse) of the old man’s song (Greisengesang). The gravedigger’s resolve was clear from the outset in Totengäbers Heimweh, whilst the stillness of death itself was chillingly apparent from both musicians – undoubtedly led, however, by Goerne – during the final stanza.

A more enchanted form of night followed the interval. Schmalcz’s piano introduction to An den Mond underlined what is surely Schubert’s tribute to Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata, however much we might regret the nickname. The pianist also imparted a winning rhythmical lilt to Die Mainacht, continued and developed by Goerne, whose An Sylvia proved mellifluous to a degree. In the second Shakespeare setting, Ständchen, I was disappointed by the initial limpness of the piano part. Goerne’s charm – as I said, it was not all doom and gloom – and detailed response to the text clearly rubbed off upon his partner, however. Another drawback was the awkwardness of the piano transition to the huntsman’s music in Der Schäfer und der Reiter. It is tricky, of course, but can be better handled than it was here.

Goerne’s reading of the Goethe setting, Jägers Abendlicht was so intense that it was almost as if the huntsman wished to seduce the moon. This proved an abiding memory of a fine recital. I could not help wondering, however, whether Goerne might on occasion have been better served by a pianist such as Paul Lewis, who had himself seemed somewhat oddly matched with Mark Padmore during the previous Sunday's recital.