Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

28 November 2005

Ian Bostridge (tenor)
Julius Drake (piano)

Franz Schubert

What the critics say

Hilary Finch, The Times, 30 November 2005

But is it singing? That was the question that returned to plague me time and time again during the course of Ian Bostridge’s mouth-wateringly programmed all-Schubert recital. Here was an evening of longing for love and life lost, of the ecstasies and the agonies of our little lives — and yet I was distracted.

With any singer, the listener measures constantly against his best. And Bostridge’s best is characterised by a searingly acute sensitivity to the sentience of every word and vowel in its musical context. But lately, his singing has been hovering on the very edges of Sprechgesang: a hinterland between elevated speech and song itself. And the singing voice has been sacrificing its full physical support and focus to a heightened verbalising. This can come perilously near turning ardour into histrionics, and can contort rhythm, melody and body into a caricature of their expressive intent.

So it was in Tiefes Leid, its Deep Sorrow living in the word but not within the melody; or in Totengräbers Heimwehe, a vignette of a Gravediggers’ Longing whose desperate world-weariness should never degenerate into grotesquerie.

Fortunately, Bostridge’s finest and most loyal accompanist, Julius Drake, was there to stabilise, and to search out tints and timbres that would complement the vagaries of the voice. And to give splendid support to all that was best: a wonderful intensity of intimacy in Auf der Riesenkoppe, its final greeting magically transmuted into the opening salutation of Sei mir gegrüsst. This was vintage Bostridge, recovering a physical ease and ardour that had been missing for much of the evening. Tiredness, or technical problems? Whichever, a short period of discreetly supervised retreat might not come amiss…

Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph, 30 November 2005

Spellbinding storms of emotion
Ian Bostridge: at his best he’s a marvel

It’s strange the things that give people pleasure. In this concert, for example, I found myself with 900 silent listeners, all spellbound by a song about a gravedigger, who can’t wait to get under the nice cool earth himself.

Some of the other songs in this all-Schubert recital were almost as cheerful. In some the death-wish raised its lovely head again, there was a lot of anguished solitude, and of course there was unrequited love in bucketfuls.

What made it so spellbinding – besides Schubert’s genius – was the etiolated, pale presence of Ian Bostridge, on whose slender shoulders the mantle of Great British Tenor has now fallen.

Like the personages in the songs, who never do anything so vulgar as eating or sleeping, Bostridge seems all spirit. When he reaches a fortissimo (which was quite often, especially in the songs about storms) his whole frame shakes like a leaf, and his furrowed brow bespeaks volumes of inner turmoil.

All this would be only “manner”, were it not made so emotionally real by the singing. Bostridge can summon up an astounding range of colour.

The opening line, “The cold, raw north” in From Heliopolis 1 really did sound like a cold November morning; and what a marvellous thawing we felt in the voice a few lines later, at “Turn your eyes to the sun!” (though half the credit for that wonderful moment must go to pianist Julius Drake, who gilded Bostridge’s line with hazy half-pedalled notes).

Bostridge’s ability to colour words was much needed in the many songs with repeating verses. In one song the phrase “Sei mir geküsst” (”I kiss you”) came round 10 times, each time with a different emotional shading.

Oddly, it was in the shallower songs about flirting or fishing that Bostridge appeared to be out of his depth. He assumed the right posture, strolling about with hand in pocket, and for one dizzy moment seemed to be actually enjoying himself.

But mundane emotions elude him. At the end of the Fisherman’s Song it becomes clear the fisherman might be “hooked” himself, by a shepherdess; it needs a relaxed touch, but Bostridge did it with the same intensity he lavishes on everything else.

At his best he’s a marvel; but for me the great Schubert singers are the ones who can range over all his emotions, earthly or heavenly.