Bode/Levit - Schubert, 13 January 2023

Wigmore Hall

Die schöne Müllerin, D 785

Simon Bode (tenor)
Igor Levit (piano)

Die schöne Müllerin, Schubert’s first song-cycle, is two centuries old this year. As Frankie Perry points out in her illuminating programme note to this Wigmore Hall recital, it has ‘inevitably been heard and understood differently’ over that period; it was first performed in public in its entirety as late as 1856. Now, of course, it stands as a pillar of the song repertoire, if sometimes suffering a little by comparison with the later Winterreise. It need not, should not; it is a different work with different challenges and rewards. One might expect Igor Levit, whose re-examinations of, say, Beethoven piano sonatas, always founded in the text yet always offering something fresh, to have something interesting, powerful, and in some sense new to say about these songs. That he did, in just that vein. Likewise his established Lied-partner, tenor Simon Bode. Again, there was no sign of novelty for its own sake, but of considered, intelligent, highly dramatic performances that took wing in the heat and light of the moment. 

Youthful impetuosity marked the piano introduction to the opening ‘Das Wandern’, a call to journey, Levit’s articulation startling whilst sounding right. Bode followed suit, likewise startling with such vivid communication of the words, a hallmark of his performance throughout. A surprising hush to the final stanza’s beginning, broadening to climax, was but one instance of illuminating detail that helped unlock the puzzle of what is perhaps the cycle’s principal challenge: how does one honour the strophic nature of its songs, as opposed either to attempted concealment or, perish the thought, veering into monotony? ‘Wohin?’ naturally went deeper, more obviously metaphysical in conception; yet, as with the rest of the cycle, nothing was laboured. This was not straining (and failing) to be Winterreise. Here, again, repetitions were never mere repetitions; the nixies beneath the brook’s surface will never quite sing the same way twice. 

Levit’s piano-playing, in its way as developmental as if this were a sonata, yet certainly not ‘abstract’, propelled music, verse, and yes, drama. Music seemed to give rise to words, as much as vice versa. In ‘Am Feierabend’, for instance, this might almost have been Schubert transcribed by Liszt: not that it did not sound like Schubert, nor that it was unduly romanticised; but rather, the introduction was so communicative that one felt little need for the voice. Until, that is, it entered, and one felt every need for it. In that song’s second stanza, Bode varied his tone with such quicksilver intelligence—colour, vibrato, and much else—that song and story sounded as if invented before our ears. 

There were certainly character and line to the whole. When we reached the central (so it seemed) ‘Pause’, brought to our consciousness with a deep sadness that again was never laboured, lightened by keen chiaroscuro in piano and voice, one felt all had led here—and it had. By the same token, all that had led there could never be determined in advance; there was no one size to fit all, just as every imploring ‘Dein its mein Herz’ in the butterflies of ‘Ungeduld’, whilst ever familiar, was never identical. That said, the closing line of the following ‘Morgengruss’, putting into words the care and sorrow that already are love’s hallmark, made its point: all had changed. 

For the sublimated, post-Mozartian pain one felt in the lines, vocal and instrumental, and harmonic progressions of ‘Tränenregen’ became very much our world: our journey, not simply a journey observed. When it went further, toward expressionist effect, if not expressionist means, in ‘Der Jäger’ and ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’, this had been prepared, fatally, though without stepping onto an inappropriate, proto-Winterreise stage. Was that, in the latter song, perhaps a hint of Sprechgesang? Perhaps, yet if so, just a hint; Schubert’s lyricism remained its guiding force. Anger spent, the desolation of ‘Die liebe Farbe’ was similarly consequent, the frightening eloquence of the piano’s left hand a dramatic masterclass in itself, only for fury to return at the close of the cleverly responding song in (metaphorical) mirror image, ‘Die böse Farbe’, green’s colour and all it signified transformed from love into hate. 

No wonder Bode’s wan tone and ultimately triumphant yet embittered irony in ‘Trockne Blumen’ so shocked; no wonder the final two songs so haunted, the resolution or completion of the brook’s lullaby hypnotically horrifying simply, or so it seemed, by being itself. Levit seemed already to be in the world of the late piano music, yet continued to play with all the delicacy of Mozart. Bode continued to resist any temptation to drag us into a world beyond Schubert, the lyricism of ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ all the more haunting for it. Both musicians proved outstanding guides not only to the journey, but to its landscape, physical and metaphysical. Heartbreaking.

Salzburg Festival (6) – Schubert: Schade/Buchbinder, 24 August 2013

Haus für Mozart

Die schöne Müllerin

 

Michael Schade (tenor)

Rudolf Buchbinder (piano)

 

 

Michael Schade’s tenor, especially at this stage in his career, would have to be reckoned something of an acquired taste. His is not a beautiful sound, but the problem goes beyond that; I am not sure that I have heard anyone sing so great a proportion of a recital in his head voice, with a generous helping of quasi-falsetto. That said, he was evidently concerned to recount a narrative, and was dramatically engaged throughout. One probably had to ‘make allowances’, but ultimately there was something moving to his performance as a whole. Likewise Rudolf Buchbinder’s Schubert proved short on charm, even at times on sensitivity. Yet, if one put oneself in the right frame of mind, of receptivity, there were insights to be gleaned.

 

For instance, the muscular, almost Beethovenian playing with which ‘Das Wandern’ opened may or may not have been apposite, but it certainly had me thinking about the text and possible readings. The lack of sentimentality from both performers here was to a certain degree refreshing, and the way in which both moved to a (relative) hush in the final two stanzas was far from unconvincing. Buchbinder’s accents in ‘Halt!’ might have been closer to what one might have expected, once again, in Beethoven, but the creaking of the mill wheel could also be discerned. Moreover, the instrumental inevitability he imparted to the following ‘Danksagung an den Bach’ offered a strong impression of fatalism to the story’s development, even at this early stage. If only Schade had been more restrained there – and elsewhere – in his use of head voice, though his dramatic faltering in ‘Am Feierabend’ certainly grabbed the attention. The ghostliness and defiance of the final two lines, in which the maiden wishes us all good night, looked forward to ‘Der Doppelgänger’. The quasi-operatic delivery of ‘Ungeduld’, however, seemed misconceived; Schubert’s ‘drama’ is not the same as Verdi’s, still less that of Verdi with a distinctly non-Verdian voice

 

The Träumerei  of ‘Morgengruß’ was, if one could pass beyond the flawed vocalism – I could, just about – both rapt and apt. Greater contrast, from both musicians, however, would have benefited the songs that followed, though ‘Pause’ possessed an undeniable dignity. Sanity was already hanging by a thread, if that, in ‘Der Jäger’. Too much? Perhaps, but as I said above, story-telling, and indeed its explication, were priorities for Schade, and laudable ones at that. Moreover, his vocal plangency in ‘Die liebe Farbe’ truly came into its own. Buchbinder’s ‘simple’ voicing of Schubert’s chords in ‘Trockne Blumen’ was, if short on atmosphere, as generally understood, of a starkness that, perhaps even despite itself, had one rethink one’s response. And if ‘Der Müller und der Bach’ seemed too vocally hysterical even for Winterreise, let alone Die schöne Müllerin, the final song, ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ proved a beautiful, cruel lullaby; the unexaggerated quality of Buchbinder’s postlude was certainly not without eloquence.

 

I am not sure that encores are ever appropriate following this cycle. Certainly Der Musensohn and a very odd, quite misconceived, performance of Die Forelle felt at best unnecessary. Without dwelling unduly on the latter, I shall simply remark that, in Schade’s performance, it served up what must have been the campest trout to have been fished for a good many years.

Salzburg Festival (6) - Goerne/Eschenbach, Die schöne Müllerin, 17 August 2010

Mozarteum

(The mill wheel in St Peter's Abbey, Salzburg)


Matthias Goerne and Christoph Eschenbach have been performing the three Schubert song cycles (including Schwanengesang) as a super-cycle for some time now. I heard their extraordinary Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall last year. This summer, they are performing all three in Salzburg; sadly, I could only catch Die schöne Müllerin, but one is better than none.

Circumstances were less than ideal. One of the many refreshing aspects of a few days in Salzburg has been a higher level of audience consideration. No applause during Gluck’s Orfeo, for instance! Sadly this audience was no better than a typical London crowd. An unfortunate apparent coincidence was the booking of the Mozarteum by the Association for the Bronchially Challenged for precisely the same time as the recital. Some members of its provisional wing, Give Tuberculosis a Chance, were also in attendance, one immediately behind me. Goerne, hardly a prima donna, seemed visibly annoyed by the clash; other audience members were livid, since such constant interruption becomes all the worse on an occasion so intimate as a Liederabend.

Nevertheless, I made the attempt to listen through the audience; insofar as I could, I was richly rewarded. It took Goerne the first song to get fully into his vocal stride, but already Eschenbach was busy with telling interpretative touches, such as the slight agogic accents applied to the piano interludes. I thought it slightly odd that Goerne should slow for the wheels’ turning tirelessly: it worked musically, but seemed a less than obvious response to the words. Wohin? was already deeply troubled, less carefree than usual: neither Goerne nor Eschenbach has any truck with the idea of Die schöne Müllerin as a lighter counterpart to Winterreise. One can argue about whether clearer contrast within the cycle would be desirable; I think there is room for more than one approach.

Danksagung an den Bach was frightening in the inevitability of what was unfolding, Eschenbach’s command of rhythm and harmonic motion crucial. Am Feierabend was as angry as I have heard, whilst its successor, Der Neugierige, provided illusory contrast with the freedom of an operatic scena. The third and fifth stanzas, both opening, ‘O Bächlein meiner Liebe,’ were extremely slow, time freezing, though not yet frozen: there is still a long way to go. To sing at such a tempo requires, apart from anything else, extraordinary reserves of breath: no difficulty for Goerne. Ungeduld came at us fast and furious indeed, though Eschenbach’s fingers could not always cope with quite so swift a tempo. There was no doubting Goerne’s ardency however.

The almost hallucinatory quality of Morgengruß truly made one shudder, likewise the attempt, however doomed, to shake off the veil of dreams (‘Nun schüttelt ab der Träume Flor…’). Throughout, of course, the brook rippled: it is at least as important a protagonist as anyone else here, somehow both conniving in and contemptuous of the false hope, the unreality of strength these musicians conveyed in Mit dem grünen Lautenbande. Fischer-Dieskau-haters would not have liked Goerne’s hectoring in Der Jäger; a bit of dramatic licence here, however, does no real harm, and the terror of the conclusion would surely have effaced any such doubts. The delirium of Eifersucht und Stolz provided a frightening prelude to the piano’s devastation in Die liebe Farbe, straight out of the world of the late sonatas. Goerne responded, in Die böse Farbe, with such vocal power at its opening and ending, that one knew the struggle had not yet quite been lost, likewise his better exultancy in Trockne Blümen, subsiding into chilling nothingness.

It was grave sadness, however, that characterised Der Müller und der Bach: a sense of peace being worked out, though that peace be perhaps too dreadful to be granted a name. One thing alone could follow, the hypnotic piano-brook’s lullaby of the final song. The cruellest of consolations was offered, cruel on account, not in spite, of its beauty. At last came a shattering stillness: if only the audience could have kept its counsel during the rest of the performance.

Maltman/Johnson - Die schöne Müllerin, 2 November 2009

Wigmore Hall

Christopher Maltman (baritone)
Graham Johnson (piano)

Only a few weeks ago, I heard Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis perform Die schöne Müllerin at the Wigmore Hall. Despite the many virtues of Lewis’s performance, I did not find that Padmore’s approach was for me. This performance, however, from Christopher Maltman and Graham Johnson, was quite outstanding. Not least of its virtues was a keen sense of the work as a whole: fluid, through composed, with or without breaks between songs, and with a clear, yet subtle dramatic trajectory. Johnson’s lengthy experience with this cycle, indeed with all of Schubert’s and many other composers’ songs, told, as did Maltman’s combination of natural ability with Lieder and dramatic experience from the operatic stage. The latter’s sheer beauty of tone, never more so than in the final stanza of Wohin!, was never an end in itself, but it was finely deployed and much appreciated.

Das Wandern began as sprightly, as full of hope, of expectation in both parts as I can recall, Maltman every inch the lusty lad with ideas of himself as a journeyman. As early as Wohin!, the second song, Johnson ensured that one could almost see, certainly feel, the brook as a constant background and frequent dramatic participant. The imploring tone of our hero in Danksagung an den Bach, ‘have I understood you?’ he asks the brook, already betokened unease, though things could go either way, or indeed in many directions. And by the time that work was over, in Am Feierabend, both musicians hinted, and sometimes more than hinted, at the danger to come. If only ... the fair maid of the mill might witness his love. But would she? Could she?

Der Neugierige took us further, though also drew us back. The sparseness of the musical delivery in the first two stanzas ensured that the words could take centre stage, but the harmony continued to do the musical work, preparing us for the melodic desolation of love in the third and fifth. One almost wanted to tell the hero to stop now, but one also knew that it would be hopeless to do so, a predicament underlined by the ardent way in which he leaned into ‘Dein’ during the following song, Ungeduld. Anger and frustration increased as that song reached its conclusion. Yet ever more Maltman engaged our sympathy, employing his head voice to infinitely touching effect in Des Müllers Blumen. The apparent triumph of Mein! was clearly to be heard, but we knew that it was deluded, as did Johnson and Maltman. That the devastation of Winterreise was only round the corner was pointed up by Johnson’s shaping of the bass line in Pause. And Der Jäger showed, through absolute musical control on both musicians’ part, that everything was getting out of hand, that madness had descended.

That song proved a bridge to Eifersucht und Stolz, in which we found ourselves in quite a new world, that of almost Pierrot-like expressionism: truly terrifying. The deathly calm with which Maltman continued, in Die liebe Farbe, was no less so, looking already towards the grave, likewise the insistence of Johnson’s piano part. In the song’s dreadful colouristic counterpart, Die böse Farbe, Maltman could speak with a wisdom born, if not of age, then of telescoped experience; it chilled to the bone. Noises off from outside the hall might have derailed a lesser performance, but Trockne Blumen would not let one go, its quiet inexorability quite gripping. (It is all very well, and quite right, that the Wigmore Hall should counsel against coughing, but disturbance from the entrance can be just as disturbing.)

By the penultimate song, Der Müller und der Bach, we were unmistakeably in the territory of Winterreise. I sensed, whether intended or otherwise, an intriguing premonition in the opening stanza of the starkness of Mussorgsky. And the chilling sweetness of the brook itself drew us as well as the hero in. Des Baches Wiegenlied was unbearably sad; much more and I felt that I might have gone mad myself. The title’s genitive was made to tell by Johnson: the lullaby was that of the brook, heartless agent that it is. We are but leaves on a tree, or better, reflections in its still, cruel waters.

This recital will be broadcast next Saturday on BBC Radio 3, at 2 p.m.

Padmore/Lewis - Die schöne Müllerin, 12 September 2009

Wigmore Hall

Schubert – Die schöne Müllerin, D 795

Mark Padmore (tenor)
Paul Lewis (piano)

At least so far as the vocal part was concerned, this was a peculiar account of Schubert’s first song cycle. There were some very good things in Mark Padmore’s performance. I shall come to those a little later, but I could not help wondering whether his was really an appropriate voice for this repertoire. Of course, there is room for all sorts of approaches, a principal distinction being whether to use a tenor or a lower voice, transposed, allowing artists as different as Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Fritz Wunderlich and Matthias Goerne, to put forward their interpretations; the cycle has even occasionally been borrowed by female singers, for instance Brigitte Fassbaender. The recording Pears made with Britten certainly does not present a typically German voice, of whatever variety, yet it works very well, not least on account of Britten’s superlative contribution, but also thanks to Pears’s marriage of verbal and musical understanding.

Padmore’s voice comes closer to Pears than to the other singers I have mentioned, but not only is it very much the sound of an ‘English tenor’, it is limited in tone, or at least it was here, and eschews vibrato to an extent that helps one understand why he is an Evangelist of choice amongst the ‘authenticke’ brigade. Use of the head voice was too frequent to make any particular point; it ended up merely sounding fey. Indeed, archness was markedly more characteristic of this performance than vernal freshness. Whilst diction was generally excellent, there were a few occasions when vowels sounded a little odd, often though not always when umlauts were involved. I was a little surprised to hear ‘heller’ for ‘frischer’ in Wohin? and ‘sagt’ for spricht in Am Feierabend, but too much could easily be made of such matters. More worryingly, there were several instances of questionable intonation.

However, there were, as I said, highly commendable aspects to Padmore’s performance too. His experience as an Evangelist often told, in the very real sense one had of a narrator – often more a narrator than a participant, it might be added, certainly more so than, say, with Peter Schreier. Padmore’s attention to the words themselves was often exemplary. To take one example, in Ungeduld, his leaning into the word ‘Dein’ on ‘Dein ist mein Herz’, conveyed a delivery of the heart from our hero to his beloved. The questioning tone at the end of Halt! really did give a sense of a participant, asking the inscrutable brook what it meant. Perhaps if the young man had been able to understand then what, if anything, he was being told, things might have turned out differently, but such is Fate.

Where this performance truly scored, however, was in the contribution from Paul Lewis at the piano. Lewis imparted a powerful, inexorable continuity to the unfolding drama, not unlike the contribution of Wagner’s orchestral Greek chorus. The opening number, Das Wandern, was a case in point, the piano part properly muscular, to borrow an apposite adjective from Gavin Plumley’s excellent programme notes. Moreover, one heard a subtle yet undeniable growth in intensity through the stanzas of this strophic song, initially matched by Padmore, though the latter drew back at the end: less, it seemed, on account of a response to the text, but rather because his vocal reserves demanded it. The presence of the brook was strong throughout so many of the songs; this, one truly felt, was another character, perhaps even the most important character of all. Another character was no less impressively, if fleetingly, introduced with the huntsman of Der Jäger. Impatience (Ungeduld) was immediately present in the song of that name, whilst the harmonic shifts in Morgengruß registered piercingly, yet without inverted commas. I was especially taken with, and disturbed by, the harmonic premonitions of Schumann to which Lewis pointed in Tränenregen. The echt-Schubertian melancholic tread of Die liebe Farbe responded in equal measure to the verbal text – suicide beckons – and to the repeated-note hints of Chopin (the so-called ‘Raindrop’ Prelude). This made me suspect that Lewis might have an interestingly Classical perspective upon Chopin’s music. One heard the Romantic horns of Die böse Farbe, whilst, in Trockne Blumen, the piano ensured that the flowers were truly withered, Finally, one could hardly resist the attraction of the waters in the closing Des Baches Wiegenlied, drawn in as the hero himself.

Padmore and Lewis are to record all three Schubert song cycles for Harmonia Mundi. Fans of either artist or of both will doubtless wish to hear their interpretations. Theirs did not, however, seem to me an ideal partnership. It occurred to me that Padmore might have been happier with, or at least more suited to, a fortepiano performance. Certainly his performance had its virtues. But listen, for instance, to Wunderlich and one hears such ease with the music, a performance that does not need to underline every verbal nuance; the music and the sheer beauty of the voice permit the words to speak for themselves. Listen to Goerne, especially his second recording with Christoph Eschenbach, and one hears something altogether darker, daring to look into an expressionist abyss. There is room for both and for much else besides. A Müllerin for devotees of Choral Evensong perhaps has its place, but it is not for me.