Wigmore Hall, London

16 June 2007 19:30

Christopher Maltman (baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)

Peter Warlock:
The Singer
Late Summer
The Fox
Captain Stratton’s Fancy

Claude Debussy:
Nuit D’etoiles
Deux Romances L.79
Mandoline

Henri Duparc:
L’invitation au voyage
Le Manoir de Rosamonde
La Vague et la cloche
Phydile

Franz Schubert:
Der Wanderer
Rastlose Liebe
Wanderers Nacthtlied (der du…)
Todtengraebers Heimweh
Wanderers Nachtlied (ueber allen…)

Hugo Wolf:
Der Feuerreiter
Der Gaertner
An die Geliebte
Fussreise
Der Rattenfaenger

What the critics say

Tim Ashley, The Guardian, Tuesday 19 June 2007

At the end of his recital, Christopher Maltman apologised to the audience for only being able to offer one encore because, as he put it: “I’ve had a bit of a throat thing all week.” That Maltman was under the weather had, indeed, been apparent. He coughed and cleared his throat from time to time between songs. At one point, a pulse intruded on his dark, weighty baritone.

None of this mattered very much. Maltman slightly off form is better than many singers at their best. He has always been prepared to take risks, and is such a superb communicator that one willingly forgives the occasional inequality. In a group of Wolf songs, he segued in a flash from the nightmare intensity of Der Feuerreiter to the whimsical Der Gärtner.

He was wonderful in French songs, too, where his dark voice is often strangely disturbing. In Duparc, he avoids the breathy, overtly sexy approach adopted by many, hinting at deeper ambivalences within the music. Listening to him sing L’Invitation au Voyage, you end up wondering just exactly what the nature of the relationship is between the narrator and a beloved whom he calls “my child, my sister”. La Vague et la Cloche, meanwhile, was a tour de force of baleful intensity, in which Maltman was superbly aided by his pianist Julius Drake. That one encore, meanwhile, was Flanders and Swann’s Misalliance – funny, bitingly satirical, and faultlessly done.

Edward Seckerson, The Independent, Wednesday, 20 June 2007
Rated 4 out of 5 stars

Since winning the Lieder Prize at the 1997 Cardiff Singer of the World (and in my opinion he should have taken away the main prize, too), Christopher Maltman has grown in mind, body, and spirit more than any singer I know.

He began and ended this Wigmore recital with songs about singers. Peter Warlock came first, his gorgeous hymn to “Late Summer” conveying so effortlessly the contentment that comes with the passing years, before summer slips into life’s autumn. Julius Drake played the piece with acute awareness of its harmonic ambiguities. But there was no such ambiguity about “Captain Stratton’s Fancy”, a bluff shanty that Maltman threw off like inhibition doused with several shots of rum.

But how audacious and theatrical to then switch from the captain’s jaunty bluster to the elusive half-shades of Debussy. Here, Maltman refused to hide behind the obvious enticements of a diaphanous head-voice; his “Mandolin” was particularly deft, Drake’s characterful “pluckings” adding to the allure.

A still more dramatic segue took us into the heady, operatic world of Duparc. “The manor of Rosamonde” scooped us up on to “a horse of fine breeding” and then carried us from romantic disillusionment to solitude. “The Wave and the Bell” was another paean to disappointment full of dark foreboding, the escape this time by boat – “a bleak oarsman, with no hope of reaching land…” How darkly Maltman leaned into that line and how dramatically he and Drake weighed in for the black climax, with Drake holding down the sustaining pedal so that the final resonance conveyed some measure of the poet’s “endless strife”.

Schubert and Wolf shared the second half, with “The Wanderer”, of course, being omnipresent in the former’s section, in the tension maintained between the thunder of his disillusionment with this world and the soft promise of eternal peace in the next.

Maltman and Drake still fanned the hellfire of Wolf’s extravagantly virtuosic “Fire-rider” before letting us down gently with Flanders and Swann’s wistful tale of the honeysuckle and the bindweed, never to be entwined.