Wigmore Hall, London
7 April 2011, 19:30
Katarina Karneus (mezzo-soprano)
Julius Drake (piano)
Grieg:
Spillemaend
En svane
Stam-bogsrim
Med en vandlilie
Bortel
En fuglevise
Rangström:
Bön till natten
Pan
Flickan under nymånen
Sibelius:
Den första kyssen
Lasse liten
Soluppgång
Var det en dröm?
Flickan kom ifrån sin ålskings möte
Grieg:
Haugtussa Op 67
Encores
Sibelius: Ilalle
Grieg: Ein Traum
What the critics say
Hilary Finch, The Times, 13 April 2011
The rustle of scarlet silk, a shoulder-blade tattoo, a lustrous voise recreating the smouldering sensuaility of a summer night with its cries and its whispers… so why wasn’t the Wigmore Hall sold out?
Nordic song is still undersold, partly because of audiences’ insatiable appetite for German Lieder and French mélodie, and partly because few but Nordic singers will tackle it. Barbara Bonney was the exception; Anne Sofie von Otter the recent champion supreme. The Sediwsh mezzo Katerina Karnéus is one of its most irresistible advocates today, and her performance of Grieg’s great song cycle Haugtussa (Troll Maidens) would have persuaded the most recalcitrant.
This tale of a mountain herdswoman whose mystical powers are unable to protect her from betrayal in love is tricky to characterise. With Julius Drake hypersensitive to Grieg’s metamorphosing of Norwegian folk melodies and harmonies, Karnéus discovered the music’s quintessential dappling of darkness and high-latitude light, without either coyness or melodrama. The upper regions of her voice floated in the clearest air; her middle range tussled robustly with the lively landsmal dialect of Arne Garborg’s verse.
At the other end of their programme came six Ibsen settings by Grieg. A slow-burn crescendo arose within the stillness and concentration of Karnéus’s mezzo for Spillemaend (Minstrels), and Drake’s fingers created pools of darkness and elusive ripple and eddyings for En svane (A Swan).
Karnéus placed three songs by her compatriot Ture Rangström next to Swedish-language settings by Sibelius as her highly charged centrepiece. The elevation of speech through melody was Rangström’s obsession; and the solemn Bön till natten (Prayer to the Night), with its chiming piano chords, was perfectly paced to capture the natural inflection of Bo Bergman’s poetry. Her performance of both composers’ songs of sultry nocturnal lovers’ trysts were particularly compelling.
Touchingly, Karnéus sang one of Sibelius’s few Finnish-language songs, Ilalle (To Evening) as an encore, together with Grieg’s Ein Traum, for those who still craved the language of the German Lied.