Winterreise, Wigmore Hall, London
St Matthew Passion, St John Smith Square, London
Some of the most perfect singing you could hope to hear
Sunday, 31 March 2002
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Few singers, however technically adept, are equally convincing in opera and lieder. Though interconnected, the two disciplines are as different as chalk and charcoal. One requires gestures that can signal emotion across vast auditoria. The other requires the kind of holistic involvement that can convince the closest observer – the kind of emotional truth that is revealed in a performer's eyes or the flick of a facial muscle. If a Strauss aria proves tricky, you might play with the woodwind or swoon a little with the strings. If a Schubert song goes awry, there's nowhere to hide. A pianist can't save a singer who's in trouble, nor is anyone likely to send in a troupe of spear-carriers to distract. Lieder, devoid of accessories beyond a keyboard, renders a singer naked.
So who are the singers that can meet the demands of both disciplines? Mezzo-sopranos Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, Bernarda Fink and Angelika Kirschlager can. So can tenor John Mark Ainsley. Of the sopranos, I'd pick Véronique Gens and Dawn Upshaw. Of the baritones, Thomas Hampson and Simon Keenlyside. And, with the possible exception of Hunt-Lieberson, Keenlyside is the most extreme in fusing these two styles: an auteur of miraculously crafted emotional honesty. Just as well. If any song-cycle needs that level of commitment, Winterreise does. The devil is not merely in the detail here – detail that calls upon minute variants of tonal quality – it's in the arc of thought that stretches across each of the 24 songs.
As a study of isolation, alienation and morbid grief, Winterreise is up there with Thérèse Raquin, La Nausée and James Baldwin's Another Country. As a play of light and shade, it out-chiaroscuros Caravaggio. As an exposition of the relationship between dreams and reality, it pre-shadows Freud. Yet it's also minimalist. Neither the destination nor the departing point of Schubert's anonymous traveller is named. All we know is that his former lover was – or was perceived to be – unfaithful, and that he therefore longs for death but cannot resolve to take his own life. It's painful beyond belief – melancholy and misanthropic to the very end – but listeners are nonetheless drawn to it for the simple reason of its beauty: a beauty that works not only to soothe that pain but to point the consequent irony with bitter delicacy.
In Simon Keenlyside's interpretation, Winterreise is less like performance than private thought or memory. The recital hall convention of (apparent) artist-audience eye-contact is all but absent, while his gestures are restricted to an occasional, seemingly unconscious, Dürer-esque prayer pose. Thus the Wigmore Hall's audience were not invited in to his recital this week, but were peeping Toms to a very personal journey through Schubert's music and Wilhelm Müller's poetry. And disquieting as it was to watch bitterness, rage and despair move across such a private public face, this is some of the most perfect singing I've heard. Fluid lines (Einsamkeit), flickering paired semi-quavers (Rast), arpeggios as dramatic as escarpments (Irrlicht), slow burning intensity (Die Krähe), blistering diction (Der Wegweiser), sumptuously stretched rhythmic details (Der Lindenbaum) and haunted emptiness (Der Leiermann).
How much of this did pianist Graham Johnson intensify or assist? Sadly not much. Though he probably knows more about Schubert's lieder than any other musician in this country, his musculature is showing signs of age. The accompaniment was cluttered and unsubtle, the details – particularly those in the left hand – indistinct. Worse still were the moments where singer and pianist pulled in different stylistic directions: Keenlyside all steel and glass, Johnson as bustily upholstered as a Chesterfield sofa. One worked with the simplicity of strophic form, the other attempted to distract from it – a job best left to Schubert's own subtle nuances – and my overall impression was of an irresolvable argument between a voice that was experiencing the music and the voice of experience. As beloved a figure as Johnson is at the Wigmore Hall – and will no doubt continue to be – it might be time for him to pass on his knowledge in an offstage capacity, and time for Keenlyside to find another collaborator.
Another great and painful work – albeit one that holds the promise of redemption – received two performances by the Gabrieli Consort and Players at St John's Smith Square earlier this month: Bach's St Matthew Passion. And though I know that you can't move for highly polished Passions at this time of year, those of you within driving distance of Aldeburgh should put this down immediately, get in your cars and queue up for returns. Yes, it's that good.
It's odd that while audiences are now happy to hear anything up to Mahler played on original instruments, authentic performance practice in Bach is still contentious. That the mass of documentary evidence for the use of single voices in this work has remained in dispute for so long, has, I believe, been bolstered by an instinctive dislike of what some call "over-academic" performances – the polite way of saying that Bach doesn't sound very nice with scratchy gut strings, farty oboe da caccia, and sopranos with less vibrato than a lamppost on a windless summer's day. It doesn't. But much has changed in the two and a half decades since Joshua Rifkin's pioneering work in Boston. Techniques with early instruments have developed, a cleaner yet fuller general vocal style has emerged, and conductors such as Paul McCreesh have had the time to experiment with different forces.
After a compromise version involving a ripieno chorus last year, McCreesh has settled on just eight singers for his St Matthew Passion – Joanne Lunn, Julia Gooding, Magdalena Kozena, Susan Bickley, Mark Padmore, James Gilchrist, Peter Harvey and Stephan Loges – each a noted soloist, each a remarkable consort singer. The impact is immediate. Once you've heard Kozena and Bickley sing the alto lines of choirs one and two, it's unlikely you'll want to return to the relative anonymity of even the most characterful choir. More than that, the instrumental performance of the first chorale melody O Lamm Gottes – usually sung by ripieno trebles but played by organist James Johnstone here – leads the listener into the heart of the orchestra, making you discern more clearly the soloistic instrumentation that informs what McCreesh calls "symphonic chamber music". An outstanding, important and powerful collaboration all round, from Mark Padmore's impassioned Evangelist to the excellent arias, the rapturous obbligato solos of Reiko Ichise (viola da gamba), Sarah McMahon (cello), and Anna McDonald (violin), and Peter Harvey's unforgettable Christ.
'St Matthew Passion', Gabrieli Consort and Players, Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh, Suffolk (01728 688303/5), today at 6pm
