SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

William Lyne Birthday Concert:  Angelika Kirchschlager (mezzo-soprano) Andreas Scholl (countertenor) Christian Gerhaher (baritone) Graham Johnson (piano) Edin Karamazov (lute) Gary Cooper (harpsichord)  Wigmore Hall, London 28.11.2007 (ME)


Over the past year the presence in the audience of the Wigmore Hall’s esteemed ex-director has become ever more of an indication of a concert’s status, with the element of ‘Ooh, Bill’s here tonight, this’ll be good / this one must have potential’ adding to the already high expectations. This packed-out evening of a ‘Birthday Hansel’ showed why: each of the three singers had been introduced to the Wigmore, and thus to the loftiest level of art song performance, by William Lyne, and each of them went on to more than justify his faith in their qualities.

Angelika Kirchschlager can do no wrong as far as most of us are concerned: her opening ‘Widmung’ and ‘Der Nussbaum’ were models of great Schumann singing, with a barely restrained sense of abandon where required, as in ‘Du, meine Seele, du mein Herz’ and an unforced tenderness in the final stanza of the latter song, where Kirchschlager’s phrasing and colouring of the words so finely suggested the girl’s yearning. It fell to Gerhaher to take on the lion’s share of the more hearty songs, an area in which he did not sound totally comfortable, since his voice, though fluent and often honeyed in tone, seems to lack a certain individual colour. He fared better in the more tender works, although to my ears his interpretations of these Heine and Rückert settings do not give sufficient weight to the import of the poetry.

No problems with giving due weight to verbal nuance in the second half, since here we had Andreas Scholl giving peerless performances of traditional songs and of two Handel arias, with Dowland’s ‘In darkness let me dwell’ suffering a little from an uncharacteristically subdued accompaniment by Edin Karamazov, whose playing was at times, to put it mildly, somewhat quixotic in phrasing and style throughout the evening. Scholl of course is a Tall Poppy if ever there were one, and he is one of the prime sufferers from that syndrome; so perfect is his intonation, so direct his approach, so virtuosic his execution, that many critics simply cannot take him in, and they find fault where there is none – something probably quite easy to do if instead of listening with rapt attention to his wondrous singing of ‘Have you seen the bright lily grow,’ you are engrossed in reading the programme’s adverts for ice cream. No matter- even a ‘non -folksy’ person such as I, could hardly fail to be moved by ‘Annie Laurie,’ and ‘Oh Lord, whose mercies numberless’ reminded us once more of what great Handel singing should sound like – technically dazzling, yes, but also searchingly expressive.

Two pieces from Couperin’s Pièces de Clavecin gave Gary Cooper the chance to show why this music is, as Lyne describes it, ‘curiously satisfying,’ and the ‘early music’ section of the programme closed with a curiously chaste version of Purcell’s ‘My dearest, my fairest.’ The final groups of Brahms and Schubert provided some lovely singing by both baritone and mezzo, the latter excelling in ‘Da unten im Tale’ and the former displaying a true legato in ‘Wie bist du, meine Königin’ although I could have done with more drama in the final lines. ‘Die Taubenpost’ was of course the final solo choice, finely sung by Gerhaher and wonderfully played by Graham Johnson. In conclusion, and to remind us that the future of the Wigmore is as important as its illustrious past, a performance of one of Schubert’s part songs, in which we heard some of the young singers who have made recent debuts here, with the tenor Robert Murray prominent amongst them.

Celebratory evenings do not always reach the highest musical standards, and it is typical of both the birthday celebrant and the hall’s present director, John Gilhooly, that this one was an exception – my only disappointment was that it was not recorded.

Melanie Eskenazi

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