Wigmore Hall, London

24 March 2006

Alice Coote (mezzo)
Julius Drake (piano)

5 out of 5 stars – The Times

Gustav Mahler:
Frühlingsmorgen
Nicht wiedersehen!
Das irdische Leben
Serenade aus Don Juan
Selbstgefühl
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen

Interval

Franz Schubert:
Frühlingsglaube D686
Am Bach im Frühlinge D361
Der Tod und das Mädchen D531
Nacht und Träume D827
Der Zwerg D771
Die Sterne D939
Im Abendrot D799
Nähe des Geliebten D162
Geheimes D719
Rastlose Liebe D138
Gretchen am Spinnrade D118
Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen D343
Wandrers Nachtlied D768

What the critics say

Hilary Finch, The Times, 28 March 2006
5 stars

Would she, or wouldn’t she? After a perfectly devised recital, an encore can seem inept, almost absurd. But Alice Coote was called back to the platform so many times that she and her accompanist Julius Drake were all but held to ransom. And the reward was just about the only song they could get away with: Schubert’s An die Musik.

Coote sang it as an ecstatic hymn to the muse who had inspired her all evening: the transforming power of music itself. And Coote is one of the very few artists who — rather than just singing superbly well — can actually summon up its presence. It has something to do with the nature of her breath control: the breath carries melody and every nuance within her mezzo-soprano rather as a brush, loaded with paint, washes the colour across the canvas. And it has everything to do with a personal commitment so focused on the urgent need to communicate through song that an audience is gripped within a tense silence of expectation.

Two groups of Schubert songs were sung without a break. Drake had devised a continuum of youth and death, dream and waking life that expressed the very heart of Schubert and which he bound together in his piano playing. Coote’s breath controlled the movement of wind and water within the simple melody of Am Bach im Frühling. Then a sudden shock as the death’s head appeared, and her voice took on the suffocating gasps of a young girl’s terror in Der Tod und das Mädchen.

Coote’s body language incarnated the soul-state of each song, without any extraneous histrionics. As her perfectly controlled half-voice sighed into death, the black-clad body seemed drained of all life. And as she sang of Gretchen am Spinnrade, Coote captured the sensuality of infatuated distraction as few singers do.

Mahler’s song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen dominated the first half. “I’ve a gleaming knife in my breast!” cries the third song; and we felt that sharp blade of grief in the present tense. Drake constantly fine-tuned the shifting colours of Coote’s voice as he supported her every response throughout the evening.

George Hall The Guardian, Wednesday 29 March 2006
4 stars

Few lieder performers are so obviously committed to their material as Alice Coote. Each song in her Wigmore recital, devoted largely to Mahler and Schubert, was presented as much physically as vocally, with the mezzo’s stance and bearing included in her total interpretative package. She acted them as if they were miniature monodramas, while the two characters involved in several items – the mother and the starving child in Mahler’s Das Irdische Leben, or the perversely gothic dialogue in Schubert’s Der Zwerg between the murderous dwarf and the queen who accepts his right to strangle her – were vividly realised.

Throughout, Coote used the varied resources of her wide-ranging mezzo to intelligent effect. She supplied plenty of textual nuance and was clearly aware why this particular note was a crotchet, that one a quaver. Such praiseworthy attention to detail, however, led her astray when her overemphasis on a specific note or word caused her to sacrifice her legato line for the sake of momentary effect.

Ironically, ignoring such a fundamental vocal tenet tended to weaken her ability to achieve the very impact she was striving for. Such faults were few and far between, but they were faults none the less. Though diverse, her two big groups – four early Mahler songs plus Das Irdische Leben and Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen in the first half, followed by 13 Schubert titles in the second – did not make for a particularly coherent programme. Mahler’s piano versions of several of his songs are awkward and ineffective compared with the orchestral versions he clearly envisaged from the start, and not even Julius Drake’s persuasive pianism could make them sound otherwise. Elsewhere he was the perfect keyboard partner in a fascinating if occasionally flawed venture.

Jim Pritchard,www.musicweb-international.com

he story of Franz Schubert is that of most composers of true genius; they live, have their few successes, many travails and then die with few really mourning their passing. That is the lot of the great artist. As a young adult lucky Franz got to abandon a financially secure teaching career in order to commit himself fully to his music. In his words, he had ‘come into the world for no other purpose than to compose.’ He never worked again in a public profession leading a very quiet life and adding to his prolific collection of compositions often just for piano and voice. Therefore, among the 1000 or so surviving compositions of his, Lieder are in the majority. This probably should not be a surprise since some of Vienna greatest singers were amongst his close circle of friends and collaborators in his music.

Schubert’s short life of some 31 years was not one of comfort and ease. During this time, however, unsurpassed beauty and great imagination poured forth in the form of those songs, other works for piano, as well as, chamber music, and symphonies. Of course, as Mozart before him and Mahler after him (to name just two), he died without knowing that his music would earn its revered place in the hearts of successive generations of music lovers. He tried and failed several times to get recognition for his music, the operas in particular, throughout most of his life. During his life in Vienna (that city all three composers have in common) Schubert had never enjoyed the financial security or the material possessions of many of his affluent friends, his first published Lieder collections, and he was reasonably well known for his piano works among music students and local performers.

Alice Coote performed (without a break) thirteen of Schubert’s Lieder from the earliest ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ of 1814 to the later ‘Die Sterne’ of 1928. If I was given that task of picking just one to take to that famed ‘Desert Island’ it would be ‘Litanel auf das Fest all Seelen’ (Litany for the Feast of All Souls). Now I do not have a religious bone in my body and little interest in what happens to my soul when I stop breathing … and that almost happened during this song, so heart-stoppingly profound and ethereal did it seem with a hushed, meditative quality that took me as close to Paradise as I am ever likely to get. Songs like ‘Der Zwerg’, a sort-of black fairytale, brought out all Miss Coote’s dramatic qualities in her rich deep mezzo, probably contralto voice (why will singers not admit to being one?), in the story of a dwarf who was shunned by the girl he loves in favour of a king … another story as old as time! The dwarf takes her life and as they are on a ship lowers her into the sea knowing it is his end too. It was all so Grimm, sorry grim, but quite stunning.

The first half of the programme featured songs by Mahler, an eclectic selection of five, mostly Wunderhorn, settings with two Lied I was hearing for the first time, ‘Serenade aus Don Juan’ and unusually jocular (for Mahler) ‘Selbstgefühl’ (Self-assurance). These were followed by the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a wayfarer).