Wigmore Hall, London

26 November 1999

Ian Bostridge (tenor)
Julius Drake (piano)

Gustav Mahler
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen

Interval

Hans Werner Henze
6 songs from the Arabian

What the critics say:

Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 12 December 1999

A brief, belated mention of Ian Bostridge, who gave the world premiere of a delicious song cycle written for him by Hans Werner Henze, to the composer’s own texts. A wistful, painful tribute to an orient both known and imagined, these poems had a jewel-like gleam reflected in the lush, beautifully detailed score. One friend said hearing this work cured him of his flu. High praise indeed.

Andrew Clements,  The Guardian, Tuesday 30 November 1999

rating: 4 stars

Melodic seduction

Lyricism, the singing line, has always the vital spark in Hans Werner Henze’s music, however much it has shifted its direction and changed its emphasis over half a century of composition, and his work list includes a number of scores especially written for great singers of successive generations. Ian Bostridge is the latest to acquire a bespoke Henze cycle; the 50-minute Six Songs from the Arabian, which Bostridge and the pianist Julius Drake introduced to Britain at the Wigmore Hall on Friday.

Unusually for Henze the German texts are his own work – there is a quote from Goethe’s Faust in the first song, while the last is a setting of a Rückert translation from Arabic, but the rest are personal memories and fantasies, some of them almost impressionistic diary entries, of people and landscapes, covering what the composer calls the territory of the “occido-oriental”. There are vivid depictions of a female praying mantis copulating with and then devouring her partner, a sunrise experienced from the roof of a temple, a boat helplessly hurled to destruction by a storm, and the lament of a woman abandoned by her husband and left to die in a barren wasteland. The imagery is multi-coloured, and the metaphors richly allusive, though in the final song, everything is much simpler and uncomplicatedly seductive.

For that epilogue too, Henze’s setting is pared down, so that the shining beauty of the melody stands out. The earlier music is harmonically more intricate, almost Bergian in its combination of heavy chromaticisms and tonal references, with taxing piano writing that Drake projected powerfully. Bostridge savoured every phrase of the vocal lines, which fit his voice like a glove; he made the wailing melismas of the lament hauntingly real, brought the brutal finality of the mantis’s coupling to vivid life, hymned the sunrise in burnished tones. He’ll find even more in these complex songs too, as he explores them further.