La Monnaie, Brussels

22 October 2009

Gerald Finley (baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)

Robert Schumann: Dichterliebe, op.48 (1840)

Edvard Grieg: Songs op.48 (1884-1888)

Charles Ives: Songs

Samuel Barber: Three songs, op.10, e.a.

What the critics say

Stephen Graham, Musicalcriticism.com, 24 October 2009

http://www.musicalcriticism.com/concerts/lamonnaie-finley-1009.shtml

The estimable Canadian baritone Gerald Finley came to La Monnaie in Brussels this week with a programme that drew heavily on his award-winning repertoire of recordings. Featuring songs and lieder from Ives, Barber, Grieg and Schumann, Finley and his accompanist Julius Drake gave a wonderful performance, replete with an especially apposite encore, that was full of the sort of authoritative fluency and interpretative nuance the duo have become famous for.

The first half was given over entirely to Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Singing to a packed opera house, Finley’s sturdy but expressive baritone immediately made of Schumann and Heine’s poet a mournful and fragile creature who was yet filled with a quiet inner strength. The singing was revelatory; Finley’s ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’ was much more stout than most of the tenor versions on the market, though this stoutness did not preclude an important underpinning of tenderness to the lament, and his ‘Ich Grolle Nicht’ burnished with a rousing, almost unbearable, passion.

Finley’s legato was fluent throughout, as were the skilfully employed range of colours and weights the singer employed through each lied. I felt Drake took a while to get going, his Monat Mai was a little gauche for Finley’s detailed and powerful reading, but he quickly hit his stride. He struggles gamely with the knotty rhythms of ‘Die Rose’, and brought real fervency to the declamatory bells of ‘Im Rhein’ and the grief of ‘Die Alten’. Overall, then, the duo’s performance was one of impressive expressivity and poise that was shaped by a creative effort to live through every moment of the score anew.

After deservedly receiving a thrilled reception for their Schumann, Finley and Drake returned in the second half with a more piecemeal, eclectic selection of songs. The extracts from Grieg’s Seks sange were brought off with a real attention to detail; each of the composer’s carefully wrought miniatures gave off flavour and subtlety in abundance. Finley is of course a masterful interpreter of Ives (see review of his Ives Hyperion disc at bottom of page), and his performances here of seven of the composer’s characteristically eclectic songs were by turns lyrical, longing, and louche. The humour that anchors so much of this material was brought to the fore by Finley’s joyously winking performance in ‘The Cage’ and ‘1,2,3′, whilst his effortlessly confident and expressive pianissimo was shown off to great effect in ‘Tom Sails Away’. Drake matched Finley’s idiomatic skill and zest; his dreamy evocations of ‘The Housatonic at Stockbridge’ ached with nostalgia, whilst his sensitive accompaniment to Ives’ thoroughly Romantic own setting of Heine’s ‘Ich Grolle Nicht’ greatly deepened Finley’s characterful performance.

Finley and Drake were by now in commanding form. Their closing performance of six songs from Samuel Barber (the latter three being his Three Songs Op. 10 on poems by James Joyce) delivered all the flash and skill we could have expected, backed up of course with the searching intelligence that characterised so much of this concert (indeed that set this concert apart from most lieder recitals). ‘The Beggar’s Song’ was delivered with real empathy for the text, whilst Finley carefully modulated the colour and heft of his voice over the course of the Three Songs to finally conclude, along with Drake’s thunderous cluster chords, on a climax of devastating impact with ‘I hear an army’. A stunned audience would not let the pair away without an encore, and we duly got it; Ives’ ‘Memories’ (and with its witty account of ’sitting in the opera house…waiting for the curtain’, how could it not have been the encore?!), which was charming and, ultimately, heartbreakingly beautiful.