SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mahler and Vienna in Song:  a recital of songs by Brahms and Mahler: Christianne Stotijn (mezzo-soprano) and Julius Drake (piano), Jerwood Hall, St Luke’s, London 8.11.07 (JPr)

I joined the ‘Mahler and Vienna in song’ BBC Radio 3 lunchtime series at St Luke’s with the second concert by the young mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn, of whom I have heard great things, accompanied by Julius Drake at the piano. (See recent Oxford Lieder Festival review. Ed)

The Delft-born Miss Stotijn is a former member of the BBC Radio 3’s ‘New Generation Artists’ scheme and here she sang a selection of Brahms songs and  some Mahler songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

Johannes Brahms once complained that singers never performed his songs in the groups in which he had published them, which he likened to ‘song bouquets’. It appears that many singers still continue to ignore Brahms’s wishes and focus on the individual songs rather than the composer’s bouquet groupings: Miss Stotijn  presented an eclectic mix including a number of folk songs from Brahms’s different collections. Seventy out of around 200 songs that Brahms finished are folk song settings, considered to be ‘volkstümliche’ and  artistically idealising the folk song style. Brahms himself wrote the following to Clara Schumann, ‘Songs today have gone so far astray that one cannot cling too closely to one's ideal, and that ideal is the folk song’. Among others sung here were one of his finest, Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht of 1884; a deeply affecting song to Heinrich Heine's poem using imagery both vivid and soothing. Death is the cool night; life is the stifling day. The singer is feeling sleepy, wearied by the day:  over the bed, a tree holds a young nightingale who sings of pure love. Its song can be heard even in lovers' dreams. The final song Auf dem Kirchhofe, the fourth of the five songs Johannes Brahms published in 1888 as his Op. 105, presents in two brief stanzas an encapsulation of some of the most central obsessions of high Romanticism: a melancholic fascination with death and a soul’s journey.

Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Youth’s Magic Horn) is the title given by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano to the collection of German folk poetry they published in 1805. They were vastly admired poets and playwrights who are remembered now mainly for this remarkable edition which provided song texts for several composers, from Schubert and Mendelssohn through to Strauss, Anton Webern and Charles Ives. Mahler  however, identified himself with Des Knaben Wunderhorn more that any of these; the substance and character of these verses allied to his musical intellect made them perfectly suited to each other as if they had sprung from the same source.

It was the emotional range of the Wunderhorn poems more than anything that made them so striking. Subjects range from love and heartbreak to childhood fantasy and to military life, war and death. Some project heroic idealism, several are funny even if the humour is often satirical or ironic:  some express bitterness, some are playful, some tragic, and some are professions of faith. Mahler spoke of the Wunderhorn poems as being ‘essentially different from all kinds of “literary” poetry, being more nature and life - that is, the sources of all poetry - than art’. Miss Stotijn sang only one that had any charm or whimsy in it (Rheinlegendchen), concentrating on the sorrow of a parting (Scheiden und Meiden) as a loved one rides away. Mostly her choices were about ‘parting’ of a final kind and dwelt on death, such as that of a starving child in Das irdische Leben.

I must say I liked Christianne Stotijn’s richly-coloured, flexible voice very much and she seems to have an engaging personality based on wide-eyed innocence. Given her repertoire, this only suited some of the songs to my mind. Problems in interpreting the Brahms began with the very first song Bei dir sind meine Gedanken where I wondered why she overemphasised the radiance in her face on the final word verbrannt (scorched),  in this song about a poet’s thoughts. The folk songs all had a certain blandness to them and the emotional temperature was only upped in the more brooding darker one,  though I never felt she put over what my reading of the poems wanted me to see her communicate.

But what a difference in the first Mahler song (Rheinlegendchen) - its playfulness suited her perfectly and her face lit up. Then back in more tragic ones such as Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen and a few of the following ones where I didn’t always hear a sufficient distinction between conversing characters such as a girl and her doomed beloved. On the other hand,  I was gripped by her interpretation of the hungry child pleading for bread in Das irdische Leben and the last one Urlicht was beautifully controlled where Ms Stotijn blended the mystical wonderfully with the song’s inherent world-weariness.

Julius Drake is an exceptionally experienced accompanist but I really wanted to ‘live’ all the dramatic music played, ‘see’ those soldiers, spirits and lovers and ‘hear’ the trumpets and the alphorn. I really wanted to ‘feel’ the music and I think Mr Drake could have helped Miss Stotijn a little more as I found him just a touch too metronomic in his playing and not quite expressive enough.

It was left to the encores to show everything that is great about Christianne Stotijn’s potential as she left her St. Luke’s audience smiling with wonderfully light-hearted and coquettish interpretations of two Grieg songs about love Lauf der Welt and 'Ich liebe dich',  sung in Danish.

Jim Pritchard


Picture © Marco Borggreve
 

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