I’ve been listening
to Kraus’s string quartets recently. They have an occasionally
startling abruptness at points that renders them a touch baffling,
and this from a composer who looked more to C.P.E. Bach and
Haydn in his chamber music than to Mozart, whose witty sign-offs
are gracefulness itself. Kraus, in these moments, is by comparison
suddenness personified.
There’s certainly
nothing so eye-narrowingly personalised in these German Songs,
half of which set the lyrics of a favoured poet of his, Matthias
Claudius. One of these songs, Die Mutter bei der Wiege
(The Mother at the Cradle), was for some time even ascribed
to Mozart.
I wish I could
say I listened enraptured, entranced, dazzled and stunned
as one masterpiece of this Mozartian contemporary rolled out
like foaming lager into welcoming steins. But really most
are strophic numbers, short in the main and simple, with attractive,
mellifluous and entertaining melodic lines - but little grit.
There’s plenty of lighthearted comic stuff – sample Die
Henne (The Hen) or a saucy interpolated whistle in Die
Welt nach Rousseau (The World According to Rousseau) –
and there are some warm and fluid cradle songs, too, along
the way. The delightful Ein Wiegenlied - So schlafe
nun, du Kleine (A Cradle - Song - So sleep now, little
one) is an especially touching example of this last
category. And I certainly wouldn’t want to underestimate his
lyric gift or his acute ear for text setting. But there are
too many similarities and rigidities in this genre and after
a while – rather shorter than I hoped – I lost patience. His
Quartets are at least questing and personalised to a firmer
degree. This genre encourages salon prettiness, the poems
easy-going charm.
I absolve Der
Abschied (The Departure) from this stricture – a long,
scena that reminds one of Kraus’s stature as an operatic
and vocal composer in his adopted Sweden. Here, more than
anywhere else, one senses Kraus’s true expressive and theatrical
potential. Easy, I appreciate, to complain that these settings
are something Kraus never intended them to be – still, the
general impression is one of repetitious charm.
There’s an imbalance
in the performances as well. Birgid Steinberger proves a fine
and communicative singer and I’d like to hear her in Haydn
opera or perhaps even in Handel. Martin Hummel has a warm
baritone but it has rather too many technical limitations
for effective communication – too often it’s unfocused and
unsupported. Glen Wilson plays a fortepiano though it’s announced
as just “piano” in the booklet information. I have to say
it sounds, intermittently, horrible and needs some serious
restoration work. In the circumstances Wilson covers as best
he can but is exposed in tracks seven and nine - that’s when
he’s not too backward in the balance, which is nearly always.
In addition the recording is really rather reverberant.
This is all rather
lukewarm but that’s how I felt about Kraus’s songs.
Jonathan Woolf
see also Reviews
by Glyn Pursglove and Göran
Forsling
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Martin
Hummel (baritone)
