Wigmore Hall London
14 January 2004
Alice Coote (mezzo)
Julius Drake (piano)
“Drake matched her sensitively, line by line” Financial Times
Robert Schumann:
Tragödie I-III Op. 64 No. 3
Die Löwenbraut Op. 31 No. 1
Frauenliebe und leben Op. 42
Interval
Joseph Haydn:
Arianna a Naxos
Gustav Mahler:
Rückert Lieder
What the critics say
Andrew Clements The Guardian, Friday 16 January 2004
rating: 4 stars
Alice Coote’s debut recording for EMI was one of the outstanding vocal releases of last year. Much of the mezzo-soprano’s Wigmore Hall recital with pianist Julius Drake – Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos and Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder – replicated the programme on that disc in a performance of equally rapturous poise and beauty. The songs that she added as introduction, also by Schumann, were much less familiar, yet formed a perfect prologue to the well-known cycle.
In fact, the Heine settings of the three Traödien form a mini-cycle on their own, welded into a virtually continuous sequence and tracing the same arc from the ecstasy of love to the despair of bereavement as Frauenliebe und Leben, yet managing it all within barely 10 minutes. The emotional territory is certainly much more familiar than that of the bizarre, ballad-like Die Löwenbraut, also composed in Schumann’s “song year” of 1840, and a rather lengthy setting of a strange poem about a jealous lion that eventually kills the girl it loves.
Despite its strangeness, Coote presented the song as a straight, unexpectedly touching drama, and throughout the Frauenliebe songs, too, she let her unerring sense of musical line and vocal colour provide the intensity. Here and in the Haydn cantata, there were phrases that would have profited from a bit more emphasis, a sharper sense of what the words were actually saying.
But that is picking at the smallest nits, and certainly in the Mahler cycle, arranged in an order that ended with an utterly serene account of Ich Bin Der Welt, there could be no complaints: every phrase was perfectly weighted, every fleck of emotion carefully registered, and the whole song was floated on an effortless, cushioned tone, to which Drake provided an equally sensitive accompaniment.
When Coote sings as superbly as this, there is no other British mezzo-soprano in her league, nor that many elsewhere in the world.
Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph, 19 January 2004
Power and presence
In a world full of singers who make a beautiful noise but not much else, Alice Coote stands out like a beacon. Her sound is beautiful, to be sure, but, more importantly, it thrills you to the marrow.
Lately she has been taking time out to recover from an over-taxing schedule, so one might have expected her to ease herself into this recital with something reflective. Instead she plunged into the hectic drama of Schumann’s Tragedy, as if daring us to think she was in anything other than top form.
The tragedy could hardly be more laconic – three short poems by Heine describing a love affair and its abrupt end in death – but, in this performance, it had an extraordinary power.
After another Schumann rarity about a girl mauled by a jealous lion (oh, for those innocent pre-Freudian days), we ascended several notches in musical genius to Schumann’s great song-cycle Frauenliebe und-leben. It’s a setting of the poet Chamisso’s exploration of a woman’s passion for her husband, and in its day it must have seemed daring (passion was supposed to be the man’s preserve). For us, a woman who sings “let me in humility bow to my lord” might be hard to empathise with. But Coote’s voice and presence have a sincerity that make Chamisso’s mawkish world seem absolutely true.
She has a way of flaring the vocal tone at the end of a phrase, a trait she used to powerful effect in the last song, where the husband is cruelly torn away by death.
There was anger, too, from the abandoned Ariadne in Haydn’s cantata Arianna a Naxos, but expressed in a more formalised and virtuoso way. If anything, Coote seemed even more at home in this florid idiom than in the poignant inwardness of Schumann (as did her accompanist, the ever-reliable Julius Drake).
Inwardness, though, came back with full force in the Mahler songs that ended the concert. It wasn’t a perfect evening; Coote occasionally seemed tense and at times her tuning went awry. But she has such an enthralling presence that the faults hardly mattered.
David Murray, FT.com, 15 January 2004
With her accompanist Julius Drake, the mezzo Alice Coote scored a quiet but vociferously received triumph. Although her programme was originally announced as all-Schumann, on the night its second half became Haydn and Mahler: the former’s cantata Arianna a Naxos, and the latter’s five Rückert Lieder.
Nobody will have complained, though her Schumann was so searching and lovely that we would have liked it to go on and on. She began with his little Trago“die trilogy, understated but telling, and continued with a Schumann ballad new to me, “Die Löwenbraut” (the Lion’s Bride, words by the always weird Adalbert von Chamisso), in which a maiden befriends a lion-cub, later grows up to acquire a fiancé and is savaged to death by the heartbroken lion. Schumann’s measured setting is sober, original and effective, though a colleague recalled “Albert and the Lion”; Coote and Drake – on his best and subtlest form – made it gripping.
Their principal Schumann offering, though, was the cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, from teenage attraction through ecstatic marriage to early bereavement. Coote barely raised her voice, even in the rapturous “Er, der Herrlichste von allen” (usually an excuse for a glad outcry): everything was inward and yet fully exposed, with an intensity that needed no extravagant vocal colour. Drake matched her sensitively, line by line. His and Coote’s exploration of the songs was exemplary and unwinking.
Haydn’s Ariadne cantata was the only occasion for a near-operatic scale of voice, to which Coote ascended splendidly; Drake might have opened up more brightly. They concluded with Mahler’s five Ru“ckert-Lieder pretty much faultless, with the first and last songs, respectively dewy and otherworldly detached, delivered in rapt pianissimo. It was after all a theatrical occasion, but of a rare musical stamp.