Barbican Centre, London
14 January 2008
Dorothea Röschmann (soprano)
Ian Bostridge (tenor)
Thomas Quasthoff (baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)
“With the astonishingly versatile Drake...” The Independent
Franz Schubert:
What the critics say
Erica Jeal The Guardian, Wednesday 16 January 2008
4 stars
Three is a crowd in song recitals, never mind four. But in Homeward Bound, the occasional vocal series he is curating at the Barbican, Ian Bostridge is being generous with the spotlight. This all-Schubert programme brought the tenor together with soprano Dorothea Röschmann, baritone Thomas Quasthoff and pianist Julius Drake, showcasing some outstanding solo lieder singing.
Yet it also included a rare thing: humdrum Schubert. The trio cantata Schubert wrote to flatter an influential singer friend on his birthday proved a stilted anticlimax to a first half that had peaked moments earlier with one of Schubert’s small masterpieces, Erlkönig. Quasthoff’s smooth but urgent lines and Drake’s relentless piano chords had shaken us with the supernatural terror in Goethe’s story.
Bostridge had begun in sombre style with four of the Harper’s lonely songs from Mignon, his uniquely airy resonance lending directness to the first three. Röschmann joined him as a perfectly tuned duet partner in Mignon und der Harfner, and her silvery soprano was even more expressive in Kennst du das Land. Yet her finest moment came as Goethe’s other heroine, in the quiet desperation of Gretchen am Spinnrade, her voice growing out of Drake’s restless but delicate piano lines.
Ultimately, though, it was Quasthoff who emerged as the master. His velvety singing of Ganymed introduced a new warmth; the wise, Sarastro-style pronouncements of Grenzen der Menschheit found him deepening his baritone down to a seemingly bottomless bass. He also made us laugh, playing the grumpy old gamekeeper to Röschmann and Bostridge’s pair of hare-rustlers in Der Hochzeitsbraten, a deft comic trio ending with a yodelling chorus – Schubert in endearingly corny mode.
Hugo Shirley, musicalcriticism.com
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/concerts/barbican-bostridge-schubert-0108.shtml
Rating: 4 stars
After Billy Budd in December, Ian Bostridge’s ‘Homeward Bound’ series did indeed take us into more homely surroundings for an evening of Lieder and vocal ensembles by Franz Schubert. In what was something of a stellar line-up, he was joined by Dorothea Röschmann and Thomas Quasthoff. Consistently fine accompaniment at the piano was provided by Julius Drake. It was a fascinating concert for which no-one could accuse the programme of being predictable, providing as it did a sometimes almost jarring shift between settings of Goethe and of other, less inspired contemporaries of the composer.
The predominantly serious tone of the first half was set by Bostridge in intense performances of the three Gesänge des Harfners D.478 with texts from Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. These songs form rather a bleak trio and although it would be impossible to fault Bostridge’s commitment in his performance, the sometimes overwrought presentation had a tendency to become excessive. He sought to heighten the emotions with various expressionistic devices which he employed rather too often: he would start a little under the note before pushing it up with an injection of warming vibrato; he emphasised words like ‘Pein’ with a snarl and a wring of the hands; he lingered, as if with constricted breath, on ‘m’ and ‘n’ sounds; in his fourth song, ‘An Mignon’, he emitted a small sob at ‘Still im Herzen’. It was an impressive display of emotional intensity but, for me at least, was exaggerated and occasionally un-Schubertian.
The soprano Dorothea Röschmann joined him for the pretty but slightly uninspired duet setting of ‘Mignon und der Harfner’ before the soprano performed her own set of four Mignon Songs, again settings of texts from Goethe’s novel. Although these are sometimes every bit as emotional as the Harper Songs, Röschmann delivered them with a welcome naturalness of expression. The simple beauty of her interpretations of ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’ and ‘Kennst du das Land’ was touching and the sense of aspiration and longing at Mignon’s ‘Dahin! Dahin!’ in the latter was captured with wide-eyed delight against Drake’s expert accompaniment.
If confirmation was needed of Thomas Quasthoff’s exceptional skills as an interpreter of Lieder, it came in the next four songs. Starting with a rollocking ‘Normans Gesang’ – based on Walter Scott – he moved onto ‘Ganymed’. Although this song sounded very different transposed down to suite Quasthoff’s range – it lost a fair amount of its characteristic lustre, the Morgenglanze described in the first line – the baritone pointed the text exceptionally well in this mellow reading. The rich, intensely human lower range of his voice was exploited in ‘Grenzen der Menscheit’, even if higher up an occasional lack of support undermined his intonation. The true master-class, however, came in a simply stunning performance of ‘Erlkönig’ where Quasthoff acted and sang magnificently against Drake’s thunderous hoof-beats. All three singers threw themselves gamely into the occasional ‘Cantate zum Geburtstag des Sängers Michael Vogl’. Full of in-jokes and cleverly turned musical pastiche, this brought a long but rewarding first half to a close.
After the interval came the high-point of the concert. We returned to Goethe and Dorothea Röschmann with three settings of Gretchen’s words from Faust. She started with an arresting ‘Der König in Thule’, followed by a truly dramatic reading of ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ and a heartbreaking rendition of ‘Gretchen’s Bitte’. Throughout her powerful, shimmering voice was complemented by her straightforwardly affecting stage manner. These three songs ran straight into Schubert’s ambitious Szene aus Faust. Roughly contemporaneous with ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, this fragment shows only glimpses of that song’s astonishing mastery but, following on from the three songs without break as here, it proved itself to be highly effective. Much of the credit had to go to Quasthoff for bringing such menace to the evil spirit’s unusually bleak melodic lines.
As in the first half, the genius of Goethe was then contrasted with some more earthly verse. This time that of two of Schubert’s close friends, Matthäus von Collin and Franz von Schober. The former provided the text for a touching if rather sentimental duet, ‘Licht und Liebe’. In this I was a little worried by the contrast between Röschmann’s simple style and Bostridge’s reluctance to produce a straightforward, unaffected melodic line; at times the tenor’s expressive games with intonation undermined the harmonic writing. I have to say that this also slightly marred my enjoyment of the final piece, the mad-cap trio ‘der Hochzeitsbraten’. While Quasthoff and Röschmann sang with easy joie de vivre – Röschmann in particular relishing her Rossinian sound-effects – Bostridge seemed ever so slightly uneasy in these boisterous, comic surroundings.
Neil Fisher, The Times, 17 January 2008
4 out of 5 stars
Should the world ever require an elite fighting force of German lieder champions – I’m thinking something on the lines of an intergalactic knock-out Schubertiad – then here are three singers who would be a dead cert for the first team.
Happily there’s little chance that Ian Bostridge, Dorothea Röschmann and Thomas Quasthoff would ever find themselves competing for the same position. Each of these superlative singers brings something different to the art-song table. And in a concert entirely handed over to the grandmaster of the lied – Franz Schubert himself – those contrasts proved vital.
Of the three, it’s Quasthoff who puts the least affectation into his artistry, and the result is that his burnished baritone is that much more involving, open and honest. Even while his soul was soaring aloft in Ganymede, he made sure to give us a wistful, very human arc to the journey. It was a tender moment as his white-hot Erlkönig was unashamedly theatrical, flickering from the father’s grim resolve to the insidious leer of the Erlking himself.
Bostridge’s limpid tenor takes things to the other extreme. There’s rarely any sitting back just to enjoy the language or a passing moment. Instead, he invests every word and every phrase with deeply expressive intent. Here, in the metaphysical gloom of Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass or Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt he was simply devastating.
So where to place Röschmann? Somewhere in the midfield, perhaps. Hers is a rich and complex lyricism, and if she breathed rapt absorption in the Mignon settings, her Gretchen (from Goethe’s Faust) was better yet – in love with the pain of love, a disturbingly faustian pact of its own.
Sadly, there was the odd whiff of stale reverence floating over this concert; a sense of overkill simply because lieder had been released from its Wigmore cage and dressed up for a larger space. Yet it was the bigger setpieces – the cathedral confrontation from Faust and two rather more light-hearted ditties for all three singers – that fell flat.
Other niggles? Sometimes Julius Drake’s muscular accompaniment could have done with a little more light and shade. And nobody needed Quasthoff’s supercilious appeal to winter flu sufferers to cease their involuntary coughing. All that noted, let’s have this top-tier trio back soon.
Geoffrey Norris, The Telegraph, 16 January 2008
Bostridge: Levity dispels darkness
Rather late in the day, the baritone Thomas Quasthoff politely complained about the gusts of coughing that had breezed through the auditorium between the songs in this recital.
Unfortunately, his plea for a guttural draught-excluder came when there were only two songs to go in this substantial Schubert programme, but at least throats were silenced in between the duet Licht und Liebe and the trio Der Hochzeitsbraten.
This last also fulfilled an important emotional function, in that it helped the evening end on a note of levity after two hours dominated by despondency, death, panic and pain.
Der Hochzeitsbraten, with its roots in the lighter traditions of Viennese theatre, is a comic scene about an engaged couple’s poaching foray on the eve of their wedding, and shows Schubert in a bubbly mood that the voices of Quasthoff, soprano Dorothea Röschmann and tenor Ian Bostridge conveyed with spirit, though in a slightly arch way that suggested that they, too, found the lurch into humour disconcerting.
This event was the opening gambit in a year-long Barbican venture that revolves around Bostridge in a range of repertoire from Bach to Britten. His purity of voice was mixed with passion in his first group of songs.
The bulk of the programme attested to Schubert’s devotion to the poetry of Goethe, with Quasthoff allotted two familiar settings in a lyrical interpretation of Ganymed and a performance of Erlkönig that had the hairs on the back of the neck prickling with Schubert’s terror-struck tension and macabre imagery, facets reinforced in Julius Drake’s piano accompaniment.
The contrast of voices had been well planned to sustain an evening in which the prevalent mood was introspective. Bostridge’s studied stance was an ideal foil to Röschmann’s more outgoing, expressive soprano, manifested in the tangible angst of So lasst mich scheinen.
In addition to Der Hochzeitsbraten, the three singers came together for a cantata celebrating the birthday of Schubert’s friend, the baritone Johann Michael Vogl, a pièce d’occasion in which the personal allusions have perhaps now been obscured by time, but the recital as a whole confirmed Schubert’s eternal powers to touch a chord.
Annette Morreau, The Independent, Monday, 21 January 2008
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
It was just shy of midnight when we slunk out into the rain of Old Street, the second instalment of Homeward Bound, the Barbican festival devised by Ian Bostridge, having come to a delicious conclusion. The festival began grandly before Christmas with a concert performance of Billy Budd, but this two-parter event focused on the voice in more intimate settings – even if the two venues could hardly have been more inappropriate.
However, for the first part, devoted to Schubert lieder, efforts had been made to reduce the enormity of the Barbican’s stage by lighting that focused tightly on the concert grand (with the illustrious Julius Drake), and two of Bostridge’s celebrated colleagues – the soprano Dorothea Röschmann and baritone Thomas Quasthoff – and Bostridge himself.
It was a dream of a programme, intelligently devoted (almost exclusively) to the texts of Goethe set by Schubert. The miracle of these “salon songs” is their astonishing breadth and beauty. With no warm-up, as it were, Bostridge began with arguably Schubert’s most harrowing songs, the three Harper’s songs from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Bostridge lived the anguished, tortured soul, his steely tone, his intensity of sound, his emphasis on the word “Pein” (pain), ratcheting up the misery of these early masterpieces.
The mood of misery prevailed for some time as Röschmann, with miraculous simplicity, bloom and beauty of line, sang Mignon lieder, including “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” and “Kennst du das Land”.
Of Quasthoff’s first group, “Grenzen der Menscheit” brought out Quasthoff’s deeply resonant bass notes in one of Schubert’s strangest settings, while in “Erlkö nig”, Quasthoff’s sickly sweet entreaties of the Erlking, contrasted with the pleas and reassurances of son and father, brought shivers down the spine.
A deconsecrated church is not a natural choice for a late-night cabaret, but fake smoke, blue and green lighting, a chair or two, and a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket attempted to loosen the mood of St Luke’s. With the astonishingly versatile Drake, Bostridge and Sophie Daneman crooned as if to the manner born in Noël Coward and Cole Porter. Bostridge plays the uptight gentleman to perfection. Only the Brecht/Weill selection could have smouldered more.