Composers: Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Claude Debussy, Henri Duparc and Peter Warlock
Performers: Christopher Maltman (baritone) & Julius Drake (piano)
Recorded: Live at the Wigmore Hall, London, 16 June 2007
Tracks
Schubert:
1. Der Wanderer – 5.11
2. Wandrers Nachtlied 1 – 2.01
3. Rastlose Liebe – 1.16
4. Wandrers Nachtlied 2 – 2.45
Wolf:
5. Der Feuerreiter – 5.20
6. Der Gartner – 1.24
7. An die Geliebte – 3.14
8. Fussreise – 2.40
9. Der Rattenfanger – 3.08
Debussy:
10. Romance – 1.59
11. Les cloches – 2.04
12. Mandoline – 1.51
Duparc:
13. L’invitation au voyage – 4.18
14. La vague et al cloche – 5.12
15. Phidylé – 6.13
Warlock:
16. The Fox – 2.37
17. The Singer – 1.35
18. Captain Stratton’s Fancy – 2.09
Encore
19. announcement – 0.38
20. Flanders & Swann: Misalliance – 4.29
About this CD
The young British baritone Christopher Maltman excels on the recital platform. Here he performs songs by Schubert, Wolf, Debussy, Duparc and Warlock with boundless charm and with a voice of astounding sensitivity, powerfully conveying an array of mixed emotions throughout.
Superbly aided by Julius Drake, Maltman’s dramatic interpretations are unsurpassed; his performance of Duparc’s La vague et la cloche was described by The Guardian as a ‘tour de force of baleful intensity’, in contrast to his ‘funny, bitingly satirical and faultless’ interpretation of Flanders & Swann’s Misalliance, sung as an encore.
What the critics say
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 19 June 2007
4 stars
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.
Richard Nicholson/www.classicalsource.com
The Wigmore Live CD series is admirably discriminating in its selection of vocal recordings to preserve. Timing is all: though Christopher Maltman has become an annual performer at the Hall, the recital here released finds him vocally developed and interpretatively matured, just ten years after his success in what was then called the Lieder Prize at the Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
The programme displays Maltman’s range Lieder from both ends of the nineteenth-century, a double helping of French mélodies, and three pithy songs from the English song renaissance. Such a mixture is a little out of fashion but Maltman and Julius Drake are at home in all these choices, each of which has a unity, if not a perfect one.
The theme of the opening Schubert group is the alienated stranger. The group begins with the least poetically worthy of the four texts, by Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck, but the performers make much of Schubert’s volatile setting. The changing moods are well captured, growing foreboding in the first couplet, the sweet and sour feeling of the second, followed by desolation, itself relieved by the vision of “Das Land, das meine Sprache spricht”. One vitiating feature is the singer’s over-enunciation of final consonants, most notably in the oracular message in the final lines: “Dort, wo du nicht bist, das ist das Glück”. The two Goethe “Wanderers Nachtlied” settings are straightforwardly sung but I am less happy with “Rastlose Liebe”. The style is too manic and the singer’s tone is lent an apparently conscious harsh edge; Sprechgesang from the singer and heavy piano-playing, including over-prominent sforzandi leave me feeling unfulfilled with the overall effect of the group.
The Hugo Wolf set begins with the massively demanding “Der Feuerreiter”. Singer and pianist powerfully project the narrative without slipping into the melodramatic, Maltman colouring his tone, not just with a broad brush in the scary passages but with small variations, such as at the discovery of the corpse in the ruins of the mill. Drake is a major player from the early running figures, through the raging fire and double-handed chords to the softening bars accompanying the slow subsidence of the blaze. This is an exceptionally well-structured performance.
Maltman’s voice is completely integrated through the registers and can move comfortably between full chest resonance, mixed tone and head voice. The latter is deployed with particular beauty in “Der Gärtner”, though some syllables on down-beats are starved of their full length. Another genial selection from “Mörike Lieder” is “Fussreise”, in whose uncomplicated jubilation both musicians beam ingenuously. Maltman applies the necessary sustained phrasing to “An die Geliebte”, where rapt concentration has to be the order of the day through a tricky tessitura and several changes of mood. In the final episode there is a pervading feeling of transfiguration. Occasional misgivings about the singer’s German re-surface in “Der Rattenfänger”, where he shows a tendency to lose the final “r”s of crucial rhyming words (most notably “Sänger” and “Rattenfänger”). He also mugs the words somewhat but the overall effect is hearty and comical enough
Maltman hints at a greater feeling of ease in three early Debussy songs. He palpably relishes the sensuousness of the French language in “Les cloches”, as well as establishing his credentials as a baryton-martin in the high-reaching lines of “Romance”. Most character in this group derives from “Mandoline”, where there is just the right degree of irony in his interpretation of the writer’s apparently breathless admiration of the wooing suitors. This view is seconded by Drake’s deftness in the overwrought accompaniment.
The Duparc group also embodies plenty of variety. In “L’invitation au voyage” the familiar phrases rearing from the depths are complemented by powerful surges of tone to reinforce “les soleils mouillés” and “de ces ciels brouillés” and Drake’s postlude perfectly portrays the profound sense of contentment. The pianist has no time to rest on his laurels: the Lisztian power with which he depicts the crashing waves and the clanging bells of “La vague et la cloche”, as well as underlining the nihilistic fear of the song’s conclusion, is evidence of the width of his compass. That both artists can settle back immediately into the initial tranquillity of “Phidylé” is a fine achievement in a concert.
Maltman’s delivery of English in the Warlock songs reminds me a little of his predecessor Benjamin Luxon in its slight nasality. He wears a stern mask in “The Fox”, which is replaced by wistful musing in “The Singer”, all to be swept away in the populist “Captain Stratton’s Fancy”, which ends the recital with a glimpse of Warlock’s roistering side. The audience is then given a soft landing with an encore courtesy of by Flanders and Swann.
The performers are caught with great immediacy by the recording; indeed the listener is located in a vastly better acoustic than the rear seats normally allocated to the critical fraternity at Wigmore Hall! There is some excessive resonance in the early Schubert songs but it soon ceases to unsettle. Fine analytical notes, befitting the Wigmore’s well-informed audience, are provided by Gerald Larner, and original texts and English translations are included.
William R. Braun, Operanews.com, May 2008
There is a familiar moment that occurs in many vocal recitals. The artist has been singing a standard program – some French mélodies, German lieder, maybe something Italian. Then, for the final group, he or she turns to his native language – Finnish, Korean, English – and we realize that the performer hasn’t been completely connecting with the material until that set of songs. There’s a moment of revelation of a different kind in Christopher Maltman’s live Wigmore Hall recital: when he slips into English for a set of Peter Warlock songs and an encore by Flanders and Swann, we realize that he has already been communicating on the highest possible level all along.
Some of the outstanding success of this recording no doubt comes from the fact that it was a live event. It’s the sort of recital where, midway in the second group – a set of Wolf songs – it is possible to hear the audience starting to realize just how fine the performance is. In a song such as Duparc’s “La vague et la cloche,” Maltman has some excellent recorded competition in Gerald Finley and Gérard Souzay. If Maltman’s rendition is slightly preferable, it’s likely because he is telling the nightmarish tale to real people, not singing it in a studio. There’s also Maltman’s decision, rare for a baritone, to sing some of the songs in their original high keys, rather than in medium transpositions. The entire Debussy group (”Romance,” “Les cloches” and “Mandoline”) is sung at pitch. This allows Maltman to sound like a true baryton Martin, a born Pelléas: “Mandoline” is breathless and immediate, like an act of reportage. The correct keys allow Julius Drake’s piano parts to sparkle and shimmer as they should, setting off the fact that Maltman also commands the low-bass E of Sarastro territory.
Of the many further delights of this program, the groups of songs have been carefully planned. The opening Schubert group, for example, begins with “Der Wanderer.” It’s a big song, ensuring that the audience is immediately brought in, and Maltman gives the piece as much variety as it can contain. This is followed by the first of the “Wanderers Nachtlied” pieces, which Maltman manages to make disturbing and unsettled without letting his tone turn bitter. For contrast of tempo (though the text still fits the theme) there’s a vigorous but not panicky “Rastlose Liebe.” The group ends with the second “Wanderers Nachtlied,” the words clear but unexaggerated, the underlying exhortation put across in an Erda-like way. The Duparc group – the other songs are “L’Invitation au voyage” and “Phidylé” – has the ideal combination of classicism and luxury that defines this composer. “L’Invitation” may be getting so over-familiar that we sometimes don’t really listen to it. Maltman has taken it afresh, reminding us that the narrator is outside of the scene, wishing to go there, which rescues the song from kitsch. Drake’s and Maltman’s complete change of color for the “Repose” sections of “Phidylé,” similarly, is so beautifully done that we cannot take this familiar master-stroke for granted.
Drake’s pianism has often tended toward the reticent, a quality that works in his favor for the Debussy group. But Wolf’s “Feuerreiter,” possibly the single scariest track in the lieder pianist’s repertoire, has no place for that, and Drake fortunately responds with the same dashing spirit he finds for “La vague et la cloche.” Wolf’s “Der Rattenfänger” is also as demonic as it needs to be. The performers are dead-on with the simple enjoyment of life and travel for the same composer’s “Fussreise” (Maltman daring the rhythmic rubato of steady quarter notes that many singers find only in their native language), and for a “Der Gärtner” that is played for real, avoiding the coy character that can be a trap here.
The Wigmore Hall Live series is a great success. Among the other vocal releases are two especially fine earlier entries from Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Thomas Allen. Maltman’s program likely will join theirs on that small list of recordings that are, more often than not, exactly what you want to listen to on many evenings.