Wigmore Hall, London
29 October 2010
Gerald Finley (baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)
Programme
To be broadcast in two parts on 6 & 7 December 2010 by BBC Radio 3
Robert Schumann: Liederkreis Op. 24
Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage
Es treibt mich hin
Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen
Lieb’ Liebchen
Schöne wiege meiner Leiden
Warte, warte wilder Schiffmann
Berg und Burgen schaun herunter
Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen
Mit Myrten und Rosen
Robert Schumann:Heine settings
Tragödie I-III
Der arme Peter
Lehn deine Wang
Es leuchtet meine Liebe
Dein Angesicht
Mein Wagen rollet langsam
Belsatzar
Die feindlichen Brüder
Abends am Strand
Die beiden Grenadiere
Interval
Robert Schumann: Dichterliebe Op. 48
Im wunderschönen Monat Mai
Aus meinen Tränen spriessen
Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube
Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’
Ich will meine Seele tauchen
Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome
Ich grolle nicht
Und wüssten’s die Blumen, die kleinen
Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen
Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen
Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen
Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen
Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet
Allnächtlich im Traume
Aus alten Märchen winkt es
Die alten, bösen Lieder
Encore
Charles Ives: Ich grolle nicht
From the Wigmore Hall website
Gerald Finley continues our Schumann bicentenary series, lending his unmistakably rich baritone to the great Heine settings of the first Liederkreis and of Dichterliebe, written within a month of each other in 1840, while Schumann was briefly apart from his wife-to-be Clara, during his extraordinarily prodigious ‘year of song’.
What the critics say
John E de Wald, Opera Britannia, 8 November 2010
The Wigmore Hall has been celebrating the bicentenary of Schumann’s birth with a series of concerts aptly entitled Annus Mirabilis: The Complete Songs of 1840. 1840 marked a year in Schumann’s life in which his output of lieder was as prodigious as it was remarkable; as the composer wrote to his fiancée in February of that year, ‘Oh Clara, what bliss it is to write songs. I can’t tell you how easy it has become for me…It is music of an entirely different kind which doesn’t have to pass through the fingers—far more melodious and direct.’ Though Schumann’s facility for writing songs and song cycles during this period was astonishing, surely amongst his best were his settings of poems written by Heinrich Heine. It is on this important part of Schumann’s oeuvre that the present concert focused; voiced by baritone Gerald Finley, the Heine settings stood out as some of the most singularly haunting and luxuriantly expressive in the whole of Schumann’s corpus of lieder.
Heine’s poems are intensely heartfelt, suffused with extremes of emotion ranging from tender evocations of loss to passages of abject despair and utter rapture. They offer perhaps the perfect pairing for Schumann’s romantic sensibility, the opportunity to revel in the melancholia of romantic longing, fleeting glimpses of joy inevitably lost too soon, and dramatic encapsulations of the complex soul of the individual. Moreover, they are the ideal vehicle for the elegant lyricism and dramatic power of Finley, who is absolutely at his best in this repertoire. He and piano accompanist Julius Drake, who has recorded these songs with Finley on the Hyperion label, work together with a cohesiveness that is uncanny. Drake’s accompaniment seemed to anticipate Finley’s every phrase; the latter’s suave baritone, richly burnished and powerful in its lower register and beautifully articulated in its upper, proved the perfect means of expression for the emotional vagaries of Heine’s text and Schumann’s music. Together, they provided a cogent example of Schumann’s genius at its height, offering a poignant interpretation it would be difficult to envision richer in either feeling or precision.
The performance opened with Schumann’s Liederkreis, a song cycle comprising nine poems taken from the ‘Junge Leiden’ section of Heine’s 1827 Buch der Lieder. As one would expect from an appellation like ‘Youthful Sorrows’, the poems are steeped in youthful wistfulness, expectancy, and melancholy. The first poems paint a vibrant portrait of an anguished lover alternately dreaming of his beloved and raging in forlorn isolation after she has driven him away. All the vicissitudes of passion are given voice, with a predominant leitmotif of intense anguish and existential ambivalence, impeccably sculpted by Finley. His dejected low notes were thick and emotive, Heine’s text voiced with excellent diction and firmness of line. The ending of the second song, ‘Es treibt mich hin’ (‘I’m driven this way’), was slowed almost to stasis, Mr. Finley’s mezza voce soft and beautiful. Mr. Drake’s accompaniment here and throughout the evening was remarkable for its intelligence and delicacy, never impelling the music but always allowing it to flow naturally alongside Mr. Finley’s singing. Neither forced themselves overwhelmingly on the music; rather, piano and voice melded seamlessly to create a gloriously pure refraction of Schumann’s setting of Heine’s text, the emotional underpinning at its core assuming centre stage.
The intense subjectivity of the narrator crescendos through the cycle; the fifth song, ‘Schone Wiege meiner Leiden’ (‘Lovely cradle of my sorrows’), was especially stirring. Mr. Finley transitioned easily between quiet, introspective sadness and torrential feeling, the contrast between the tenderness of his upper register and the dark power of his lower serving him particularly well. As the narrator bade farewell to the place where he first saw his beloved, Mr. Finley’s lightly floating high notes were superb, inflected with quiet dejection. The contrast to the following stanza, where, entrenched in despair, he longs never to have laid eyes on her, was haunting. The luxuriant depths of Mr. Finley’s baritone was suffused with a fire that filled the hall. The eventual relief supplied by the barcarolle ‘Berg’ und Burgen schau’n herunter’ was certainly welcome, Mr. Finley’s final note sailing wistfully over the piano, lovingly sustained before fading to nothing.
The Leiderkreis song cycle was followed by ‘Tragodie’, a short, sparely accompanied narrative of ill-fated lovers voiced affectingly by Mr. Finley. This led to ‘Dear arme Peter’ (‘Poor Peter’), a disturbing portrait of a man who watches his beloved marry another and then, driven mad, ultimately staggers to his grave. The conflation between the grief of unrequited love and emerging insanity was startling; Mr. Finley’s interpretation was suitably heartfelt and crushing, the utter despair of the climax conveyed with abandon.
Fortunately, every Heine setting does not follow the course of a narrator crippled by despair and verging on madness; Schumann also set a number of Heine’s dramatic poems, captivating pieces weaving together threads of romantic tableaux. The first of these was ‘Belshazzar’, a re-telling of the fall of Babylon and its hubristic king. The song is a thrilling example of tonal scene painting and storytelling in music; Mr. Finley imbued his voice with a full measure of dramatic flair, bringing the story to life from its forlorn opening to its chilling conclusion, the death of Belshazzar foretold in menacingly hushed tones. This was followed by ‘Die feindlichen Bruder’ (‘The warring brothers’), another dramatic ballad. Describing the battle of the eponymous warring brothers over the woman they both love, it offers some wonderfully impassioned music, far less subdued and melancholy than so many of the settings. It elicited dynamic performances from both Mr. Finley and Mr. Drake. This ardor was perhaps most strongly conveyed in the final selection from the first half, ‘Die beiden Grenadiere’ (The two grenadiers’). Schumann and Heine were both admirers of Napoleon, and the text is centred on a pair of French soldiers fighting under the Emperor. Schumann interpolates the Marseillaise, gloriously played by Mr. Drake, into the song, so seamlessly incorporated that it emerges unobtrusively, almost of its own accord. Mr. Finley’s singing filled with patriotic fervor as his passionate cries of ‘Mein Kaiser, mein Kaiser’ (‘my Emperor, my Emperor!’) resounded; it was almost enough to move one to jingoism, and a thrilling conclusion to the first half.
The second half of the concert comprised a single work, Schumann’s great song cycle Dichterliebe. The work encompasses a distillation of the complex sentiments of Heine’s poems, opening with the lighthearted and optimistic ‘Im wunderschonen Monat Mai’ (‘In the wondrous month of May’) and carrying on through the accustomed extremes of rapture, quiet reflection, and utter dolefulness. In consonance with the first half of the concert, Mr. Finley gave exquisite voice to every spectrum of emotion, the radiant timbre of his baritone giving an underlying strength to Heine’s narrator, no matter how dejected his soulful outpourings. In the midst of so much angst, the effervescent ‘Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube’ (Rose, lily, dove) stood out, as did the inherent nobility of ‘Im Rhein, im heligen Strome’ (‘In the Rhine, the holy river’), the power of the Rhine evoked in the velvet rumblings of Mr. Finley’s warm lower register. The cycle returned to evocations of pain with ‘Ich grolle nicht’ (‘I bear no grudge’), the outcry of the ending, in which the narrator rails against his lover, ravishingly expressed by Mr. Finley. The accompanying melodies of many of these songs take on a life of their own that is absent in the sparer Heine settings; in its sometimes frenzied outpourings, the piano accompaniment of Dichterliebe can sound singularly modern. Mr. Drake brought out this aspect of Schumann’s music with éclat, his playing repeatedly proving as emotive in its way as Mr. Finley’s baritone.
Following the end of the cycle, Mr. Finley returned for a single encore, Charles Ive’s splendid setting of Heine’s ‘Ict grolle nicht’. It was a marvelous climax to the evening, keeping with the tenor of Heine settings but offering a welcome contrast to those of Schumann. Mr. Finley sang movingly to Mr. Drake’s nuanced accompaniment, holding the final note sustained in the air, slowly expanding outward and then floating weightlessly before finally transitioning to a measured silence. In these lieder, the right delicacy and employment of silence can be as telling as the music itself; in his incisive, poignant delivery, it was clear that Mr. Finley understands this perfectly.
The performance was recorded for future airing on BBC Radio 3, and will certainly warrant listening for those who missed this truly superlative rendering of many of Schumann’s most beautiful lieder.