Tchaikovsky Romances: Christianne Stotijn, Julius Drake
This recording has WON the Vocal category in the BBC Music Magazine 2010
Awards. The award is a great accolade from the music industry and music-lovers who voted for their favourite discs. The winners were announced at the BBC Music Magazine Awards ceremony on Tuesday 13 April at Kings Place: play the video of the ceremony below (courtesy of BBC Music magazine website)
Composer: Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich
Performers: Christanne Stotijn (mezzo), Julius Drake (piano)
Label: Onyx
Catalog number: ONYX 4034
Third release on ONYX from young Dutch mezzo and rising star Christianne Stotijn.
Tracklisting
1 At the Ball op.38 no.3 2.33
2 None but the lonely Heart op.6 no.6 3.30
3 Over burning ashes op.25 no.5 1.47
4 My genius, my angel, my friend! 1.55
5 Lullaby op.16 no.1 3.16
6 Reconciliation op. 25 no.1 5.17
7 The sun has set op.73 no.4 1.41
8 The fearful moment op.28 no.6 3.35
9 Mild stars looked down op.60 no.12 3.26
10 Had I only known op. 47 no.1 4.00
11 The lights were being dimmed op.63 no.5 2.46
12 Not a word, my friend op.6 no.2 3.06
13 Why? op 6, no.5 2.56
14 The Bride’s Lament op.47 no.7 5.47
15 The gypsy song op.60 no.7 2.39
16 Do not believe, my friend op.6 no.1 3.57
17 It was in early spring op.38 no.2 2.38
18 Cuckoo op.54 no.8 2.31
19 Can it be day? op.47 no.6 3.19
20 Again, as before, alone op.73 no.6 2.15
This beautiful collection of 20 Tchaikovsky songs represents the whole range of his creative life from his first performed composition “My Genius, My angel, my friend,” written when we was 16, through to the last published song from the year of his death “Again, as before, alone”. Includes favourites such as “None but the Lonely Heart” and “Why?” but also rarely heard songs such as “Mild Stars Looked down”, “The Cuckoo” and “The Gypsy Song”
Christianne learnt Russian especially for this recording and toured it widely before recording it with her superb pianist Julius Drake. This recording should do much to re-evaluate Tchaikovsky as one of the greatest composers of song and not just a writer of pretty tunes.
Both Christianne’s previous recitals earned rave reviews: “a really exciting event” (Gramophone); The most impressive debut disc since Bryn Terfel was a lad (***** Classic FM magazine); Vocal Recording of the Month ***** (BBC Music Magazine) (ONYX4009) “astonishing sophistication “ ***** BBC Magazine “One of my recordings of the year” (Michael Kennedy, Sunday Telegraph) (ONYX4014)
Christianne was recently a BBC Young Generation Artist and has had London dates with Haitink (Mahler 2) and Das Lied von der Erde with Budapest FO/Ivan Fischer. Forthcoming highlights include Covent Garden debut (title role) in Tamerlano and Handel’s Jephthe with Paul McCreesh.
BBC Music Magazine Awards – Feature
‘I’m an alto today,’ Christianne Stotijn cheerfully tells us in a voice that, thanks to a cold, has dropped an octave. But it’s the dark, burnished ‘alto’ colours within her mezzo voice make it so well-suited to Russian repertoire, and gave her winning performances of Tchaikovsky their depth and texture. ‘Tchaikovsky’s songs have turned out to be the beginning of what
I hope will be a life-long journey into Russian music, poetry and literature. What is wonderful about this award is that it has given me the encouragement to go on down that path. Now Julius [Drake] and I will be exploring the songs of Musorgsky, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev.’
This summer Stotijn plans to go to St Petersburg and follow the Tchaikovsky Trail wirh her Russian language coach, who was a key figure in this recording. ‘Raya Drobyshevskaya has been great to work with and I’m slowly learning Russian now, not just to sing, but to speak as well. What has been very rewarding is the warm response to my Tchaikovsky from Russians themselves. If they say I, a non Russian, sing it well, then I’m doing something right!’
She treasures the memory of the recording session itself. ‘It was a very special collaboration. We recorded it surrounded by candles and found such love and intimacy in these songs. I’m glad that perhaps the pleasure we felt, and the passion we found in the music, has touched those listening.’ Drake agrees, believing that the composer’s songs come ’straight from the heart. In the five years we’ve worked together, these Tchaikovsky Romances represent a real voyage of discovery for us both. We’re thrilled to have won.’
On The Record… Christianne Stotijn
Classic FM magazine, April 2009
Is there a difference between Tchaikovsky the song composer and Tchalkovsky the opera composer?
Yes, there is a difference in his writing for orchestras and for the opera stage. I think his songs are most closely related to his string quartets and other chamber music. It’s about delicateness in relation to text, which is at the forefront in his songs.
Can you learn anything about how Tchaikovsky views texts by studying the piano part?
In the piano part he immediately creates a story in itself; as a singer you can step into this ready-made world. To sing with Julius Drake is a great joy as he really knows how to paint the feeling of a song.
Do you think about character in the songs, as you would if you were in an opera?
No. It’s true that in opera I would be concentrating on the character: background, relationship to other characters, environment and so on. But a song is just a single moment of emotion; it can carry pure imagination and sometimes your own experiences, feelings and longings. Imagination is the most important for both opera and song.
What is it that draws you in to the world of Lieder?
Love – by which I mean a few things: the freedom song gives you in allowing you to create your own world; the great chamber-music feeling you get when you’re together with a pianist and painting a moment with words; my love for words and poems; and more than anything the relationship between words and music.
What the critics say
Richard Nicholson, www.classicalsource.com
Here is another issue to confirm the multitude of lyric mezzos around today – and another with youth on her side. Christianne Stotijn offers the promise of many years to come at the highest level of performance. The voice is warm, firm and rounded in the lower register. Above C, when pressed, the vibrato loosens a little, which is less agreeable as sound but an authentic conveyor of dramatic expression. There has been some debate about the quality of Tchaikovsky’s songs. The Russian Romance does not occupy as prestigious a position in musical esteem as Lieder or mélodies. Among Russian song-composers it is Mussorgsky who holds the highest rank, a Debussy to Tchaikovsky’s Gounod, as it were. Of this selection, however, I find only one setting that is redolent of the salon (“Early spring”). It is true that many are restricted to a single mood; though the way Stotijn and her ubiquitous and infinitely adaptable accompanist Julius Drake explore beneath the surface prevents monotony.
I was initially disconcerted by an acoustic that brings both participants close and gives the voice a halo of resonance, quite unlike a concert hall ambience. However, one soon gets accustomed to this.
As with a number of other composers (Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, even Richard Strauss), only a handful of Tchaikovsky’s more than 100 songs appear on recital programmes. The attraction of this issue lies also in the exposure of some rarely performed compositions. Most of the best-known songs are here. Of those missing, “I bless you forests” and “Don Juan’s Serenade” are expressly male songs but there would have been room for “Pimpinella”.
The recital begins with two familiar songs and ends with two more. Otherwise the order of the songs displays no clear, coherent structure. Neither chronology nor theme appears to determine the sequence. There is some alternation of major with minor keys in successive songs and a degree of contrasting moods. Fortunately the interpretations always maintain interest.
Stotijn’s is not on the whole a theatrical approach. In the familiar “None but the lonely heart”, itself greatly diluted in translation from Goethe’s original, we hear what sounds like the experience of a decent, everyday victim, detailing her suffering in long concentrated phrases, only briefly approaching a loss of emotional control (which she shamefacedly regrets before re-asserting her composure). “Not a word, my friend”, is another song of suffering in which a current state of depression is conveyed in grey, bleak tone in both the opening and closing phrases, framing a discharge of emotion in the central stanza, as the poet bemoans the contrast between present depression and past happiness.
“Over burning ashes”, another negative song, receives an imaginative setting. The agitated opening section describes how a smouldering parchment can flare up, destroying both itself and the words it contains. A contrasted reflective middle section describes the poet’s own state of unproductive Weltschmerz. He suddenly sees the possibility of turning this metaphor into the reality of his escape from misery through suicide, signalling a return to the initial tempo. Stotijn draws upon the range of colours in her voice to convey the monotony of the poet’s current existence and his elation when the solution presents itself; the latter is heightened by Drake’s playing of the furious running, tumbling semiquavers in the postlude.
One is often conscious of references to Tchaikovsky’s own unhappy life and frustrations. Many of these songs are subjective and expressive of intense emotion. The theme of nostalgia for an irretrievable past happiness appears frequently in the collection. In “Reconciliation”, although the poet declares the futility of longing for its return, Tchaikovsky’s setting clearly leaves little doubt that the subject cannot accept this. In a final verse of protest against fatalism, Stotijn’s tone freezes with misery and Drake’s postlude emphasises its false conclusions, as if not bearing to bring an end to the memories.
Never do the artists wallow in self-pity. Nothing is overdone. Discreet restraint is applied from the start. The writer of “At the ball” may be love-struck but she is as yet unsure of herself and unwilling to surrender to the new experience. In the final lines, as she succumbs to her dreams, Stotijn’s lingering over the vowel sounds reinforces the sense of hesitancy.
Links can certainly be heard with Tchaikovsky’s operatic writing. “Eugene Onegin” is reflected is “The Fearful Moment”. Just as Tatiana has to endure the tense uncertainty that follows a declaration of love, here Tchaikovsky, in a setting of his own lyrics, conveys the apprehension and embarrassment.
To balance the unhappy element of the composer’s output there are some unadulterated happy items. “The sun has set” projects a mood of confident expectation at the transition into night, with bright prospects of fulfilment reflected in smiling tone and breathless anticipation as the composer’s consistently upward-moving vocal phrases are perfectly projected.
Some critics have berated Tchaikovsky’s piano-writing: preludes and postludes have been accused of having little connection with the texts that they surround. There is some support for this view in the prelude to “Can it be day”, what the writer of the booklet note, Richard D. Sylvester, calls the “easy-going Andantino” with which the piano part begins seems to have no link either with the playful semiquavers into which it metamorphoses or the flowing phrases which eventually characterise the song.
The interpretations of this partnership belie that accusation. On several occasions the pianist defines or confirms the ultimate meaning of the song in his concluding solo bars. In “Why?” the voice breaks off, unsure of the answer to the question, to be succeeded by the pianist. On numerous occasions Drake’s use of the sustaining pedal extends the duration of a song and forces us to reflect on its message. Folk-style also plays its part. Included here is only one of Tchaikovsky’s songs for children “The Cuckoo”. This takes the form of a dialogue, not unlike a setting in Mahler’s “Des Knaben Wunderhorn”, with an imaginative and powerful piano accompaniment and the opportunity for the singer to characterise, which Stotijn does with the beaming grin of a true comedian and without being arch.
The great triumph here is “Had I only known?”, in which a girl bemoans her failure to anticipate her betrayal by a lover. The folksong-like piano figures at the start and the finish encase a dramatic narration in which the singer first utters repeated snatched phrases of bewilderment, echoed by the pianist. In the second stanza she turns to a more melodic style, growing in urgency and reaching a climax before resuming the initial fragmentary utterances, culminating in a descending scale passage worthy of an operatic soprano. The transformation of folksong into operatic aria has yet one more twist, as a final repetition of the phrase of regret she had been using throughout culminates in a long, wordless melisma down in to the depths of the singer’s chest register. This is a four-minute masterpiece!
Professor Sylvester has neatly condensed the commentary on each of the songs contained in his book “Tchaikovsky’s Complete Songs: A Companion with Texts and Translations” and Onyx have supplied those translations alongside transliterations of the original Russian texts. The book lists in each case the artists who have recorded each of the 103 Tchaikovsky songs. The length of that list underlines how rewarding these Romances have been to singers. Another advantage of the book is its inclusion of a CD containing recordings (made between 1910 and 1979) of twenty-two of Tchaikovsky’s songs.
To judge by the thought that has been put into this recital and also its execution, Christianne Stotijn can be expected to illuminate the Art-Song repertoire as she extends the range of songs.
Gramophone Editor’s Choice – February 2009 [James Inverne]
An album to remind one of the treasures of Russian song. Remember that wonderful Sergei Leiferkus Mussorgsky song series? But I digress. The ever more impressive Christianne Stotijn invests this marvellous collection with intelligence and refulgent tone, even managing to sound idiomatic (well, to my non-Russian ears). She is well matched by Julius Drake. A real pleasure.
Editor’s Choice
Patrick O’Connor, Gramophone, 9 February 2009
As the penultimate track on this very beautiful recital, Christianne Stotijn and Julius Drake perform “Can it be day?”, the song that was once known as “Pour toi”. This was recorded long ago by Grace Moore with a sumptuous Hollywood orchestration, and its surge of ecstatic, not to say erotic, melody comes as a welcome reminder that the Tchaikovsky of Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake could occasionally make himself felt in his songs. For the most part these are angst-ridden stories of death and lost love. The two best-known songs open proceedings: “At the Ball”, with its reminiscence of unrequited passion to the lilt of a sad waltz, and then ”None but the lonely heart”. Everyone conceivable from Rosa Ponselle to Frank Sinatra has recorded this, but Stotijn loses nothing in comparison with ghosts from the past. Her voice is a full-blooded mezzo but steady and true, without a hint of that vibrato that can often disturb the line in Slavonic singers (Stotijn is from the Netherlands).
The emotional climax of the selection comes with “The Bride’s Lament”. This outpouring of grief (sometimes called “I was not a blade of grass”) can seem over melodramatic but Stotijn and Drake find exactly the right mood. The piano parts are superbly done: in every sense these songs are duets. There are a couple of other light moments – “Cuckoo”, one of 16 children’s songs composed in the 1880s (this used to be a favourite of Elisabeth Söderström), and a “Gypsy Song” from around the same time. Tchaikovsky’s songs are not nearly well enough known and this superb recital should encourage more interest in them. A second volume, please, and soon! Highly recommended.
The Times, 16 January 2009 [GB]
Among mezzosopranos, Christianne Stotijn is in a class apart; she stamps every note and word with character, and delivers her songs with a lyrical glow that considerably advances global warming. This Tchaikovsky selection rolls happily through plangent love dramas and comic folk tales, through Tolstoy poems and Goethe too. Whatever the song, Stotijn sings from the heart to the heart. Praise too for Julius Drake, a deft piano accompanist.
Geoffrey Norris, Daily Telegraph, 17 January 2009
If Tchaikovsky’s songs have not in general achieved such widespread attention as his symphonies, concertos or even the operas, at least some of the ones in this ‘beguiling recital, sung in ‘Russian by the Dutch mezzosoprano Christianne Stotijn, are fairly well-known. None but the lonely Heart, At the Ball, My Genius, My Angel, My Friend and Lullaby have long been in the pantheon of great Russian songs and Stotijn, beautifully and perceptively accompanied by Julius Drake, brings to them a rich, burnished tone coupled with expressive sincerity and refinement.
There is a linking thread of melancholy or resignation running through much of this selection, although Stotijn imbues Had I Only Known with the breathless excitement of a girl yearning to see again the handsome man glimpsed from her window, and in such songs as The Sun has Set or Mild Stars Looked Down she responds to the rapture with a radiant glow.
Financial Times, 17 January 2009
Four out of five stars
For anyone reared on his symphonies and concertos, the quality and quantity of Tchaikovsky’s songs can come as a surprise. Many sound like operatic scenes, in which the yearning romanticism of the poetry is distilled through the composer’s poignant imagination and melodic genius. Stotijn, deftly accompanied by Julius Drake, proves a winning guide; always keeping the emotion under wraps while indicating there is a pulling heart beneath the surface. Her selection of 20 songs ranges from the popular “None but the lonely heart” to the turbulent undertow or “Reconciliation”, the tender nostalgia of “Mild stars looked down” and the folksy lilt of “Had I only ‘known”.
Göran Forsling, Musicweb international Seen & Heard, March 2009
Last year reviewed the two latest instalments in the Naxos series of the complete Tchaikovsky songs. I was seriously disappointed. So it’s a great pleasure to receive this disc as a corrective. And not just as a corrective, since this is in fact the best disc with Tchaikovsky’s songs since Elisabeth Söderström’s collaboration with Vladimir Ashkenazy more than twenty-five years ago. They produced quite a number of memorable recordings, including also a substantial helping of Rachmaninov songs, which also have to be regarded as benchmark versions. Tchaikovsky’s songs have seen one or two comparable recordings, one of the most recommendable is a Hyperion disc with Joan Rodgers. I gather that CD is being reissued in the Helios series. Whatever the merits of that issue, of which I have heard only a couple of excerpts, it would have to be very good indeed to challenge the present disc with Christianne Stotijn. Though her Russian seems impeccable to my non-Slavonic ears she is Dutch. I have had reason to praise her on a couple of previous occasions, most substantially her Mahler recital that arrived a little over a year ago.
The largely melancholy world of Tchaikovsky seems to suit Ms Stotijn to perfection. She radiates warmth and has beautiful tone. Her quick vibrato, which is perfectly controlled, adds personality. Moreover, and this is most important for a singer of romances, her phrasing is unerringly musical and sensitive. She opens the recital with two of the most well-known Tchaikovsky songs. In At the ball all the aforementioned characteristics are in clear evidence. None but the lonely heart, sung and recorded by almost every singer of some importance – and not only by artists in the classical trade – is even better. Julius Drake’s superb introduction is in itself almost worth the price of the disc. Stotijn is wonderfully inward and concentrated. I can’t remember hearing a finer reading ever.
The positive impressions of these two songs remain throughout the programme and are even enhanced. Drake is certainly one of today’s foremost accompanists, flexible and sensitive. His playing in the dramatic and intense Over burning ashes is magnificent. He is a pillar of strength throughout the disc. Regarding Christianne Stotijn, her real strength is that she neither sentimentalizes the songs nor invests them with more dramatic gestures than they can hold. After all these songs – at least most of them – are lyrical miniatures and actually grow in stature when sung inwardly. Some of the most ravishing examples of this aspect are the intimate My genius, my angel, my friend and Lullaby. Especially in the latter it is remarkable how skilfully Stotijn lightens her rather voluminous voice and caresses the melody with beautiful pianissimo singing. At the other end of the spectrum is Had I only known: intense, emotionally charged and still subtly nuanced. This is the song I will return to most often in the future but I am sure I will be tempted to play the rest of the recital as well, once I have started listening. In a more light-hearted mood Cuckoo, one of Elisabeth Söderström’s favourite songs, is another real hit.
With this disc Christianne Stotijn takes a big leap from ‘utterly promising’ to ‘near the top of the trade’. I will be eagerly awaiting her future excursions in the song literature – why not a sequel to this one? There are enough gems among Tchaikovsky’s songs to fill a volume two. In the meantime the present disc should be savoured by all lovers of good song interpretation.
Hugo Shirley, Musicalcriticism.com, 10 February 2009
Christianne Stotijn’s new disc for Onyx sees her leave behind the German lieder that she sang, to great acclaim, on her first two discs for the label to tackle a programme of Tchaikovsky. And with her now regular accompanist, Julius Drake, the results are no less persuasive.
Richard Sylvester’s liner note quotes a description of Tchaikovsky’s song output – he wrote more than 100, designating them Romances – as ‘the most poignant creations of his genius’. This is very much borne out by the selection here and they are songs which even with the scantest knowledge of Tchaikovsky’s biography take on even greater poignancy. The poems speak predominantly of love, but it’s a love that seems only to result in pain, fear of rejection and regret: a mood that Tchaikovsky captures consistently with a touching, highly personal blend of melody and melancholy.
The programme extends from the early ‘My genius, my angel, my friend’ (1857) – an astonishingly assured song in terms of both musical language and technique – through most of Tchaikovsky’s creative life and for anyone familiar with Stotijn’s talent and temperament, it will come as no surprise to find her very much at one with the composer’s idiom. From the start of ‘At the ball’, which opens the disc, Stotijn captures that mixture of wide-eyed vulnerability and suppressed passion that runs through much of the programme. Some might find her way with the favourite songs a touch understated at times – she makes a lot less of ‘Why?’, for example, than some – yet she does not turn her back on the raw emotion that often rears its head in the midst of so much melancholy reverie.
Stotijn’s control is consistently impressive, such as in a beautifully nuanced and haunting rendition of ‘Lullaby’, with its floated top note on the penultimate line, or the pared down sound she produces for the final melisma in ‘My genius’. In the ‘Bride’s lament’, she once again captures the almost objective melancholy but, when required, injects emotion to telling effect, here to Drake’s gentle embellishment of the vocal line.
Several of the songs are highly suggestive of the operas, perhaps none more so than ‘The fearful moment’. Despite its strong musical and poetical hints of Tatyana in Evgeny Onegin, however, Tchaikovsky here provides his own verse in a song that can hardly be listened to without thought of the emotional turmoil that informed much of his biography. Again and again the highly personal nature of these Romances comes to the fore, such as with the almost shockingly emotional outburst in the piano part at the heart of ‘Do not believe, my friend’. Even ‘Can it be day’, one of the few songs on the disc that captures the exhilaration of being in love, ends in a thoughtful postlude (beautifully shaped by Drake), while the optimism that one feels at the start of ‘It was early Spring’ again dissolves into something less up-beat.
Possibly the most enjoyable number on the disc is the delightful ‘Cuckoo’, one of several songs Tchaikovsky wrote ‘for children’ but which is both humorous and sophisticated, looking forward to Mahler’s ‘Lob des hohen Verstands’, yet without its satirical undertow. There’s nothing elementary about the demands it makes on the performers – both of whom are exemplary – however it leaves one wishing that maybe the decision had been made to leaven the atmosphere with a few more songs in this vein.
Although she seems particularly adept at finding the Schumannesque Innigkeit that is prominent here, Stotijn produces heart-felt emotion, never artificially heightened, when called for. There have no doubt been more powerfully charged – or highly-strung – champions of this relatively unknown part of Tchaikovsky’s output (such as Julia Varady on her Orfeo recital) yet Stotijn’s approach is convincing and affecting. With typically sensitive support from Drake and natural engineering from Onyx, this disc can be highly recommended
David Nice, BBC Music Magazine, March 2009
Performance: Five out of five stars
Recording: Five out of five stars
Don’t be disconcerted by the unconventional approach to line in the relatively familiar song which begins this recital, ‘Amid the din of the ball’: Christianne Stotijn is that artist in a thousand whose personality shines through everything she does. So it’s a subtly varied and coloured journey through the many terrains of Tchaikovsky, from the blackest (the last song of all, ‘Again, as before, alone’) to the ecstatic (’Can it be day’, one of the few places where Stotijn’s fast vibrato comes under pressure and under the note). In between, there’s a fresh approach to familiar numbers such as the bittersweet ‘Lullaby’, more robust than usual, and ‘Not a word, my friend’ -like many of the darker numbers, never overdone but luminously voiced. Her Russian characterisations and folk inflections seem spot-on in the vivid narratives of ‘Had I known’, ‘The Bride’s Lament’ and ‘The Cuckoo’.
Here, too, as in their often wonderful Mahler recital together, Julius Drake’s focused narratives make us want to hear even more from him: I’d probably have been just as happy if the songs had been interspersed with some of the more vivacious of Tchaikovsky’s piano pieces. But Stotijn’s charisma and her beautifully recorded altoish depth of tone is enough to hold me spellbound.
Andrew Mellor, Classic FM magazine, April 2009
Disc of the Month
Christianne casts a spell
Through this bewitching recital from Christianne Stotijn, Andrew Mellor discovers a side of Tchaikovsky often hidden from public view
’Amid the din of the ball .. I caught sight of you. Your eyes were gazing sadly, but your voice had a wonderful sound.’ Tolstoy’s verse drew from Tchaikovsky a beautiful but pretty simple tune. The accompaniment is similarly uncomplicated: anyone could look at the score and recognise the straightforward pattern of the piano’s Waltzing underlay. But seconds into listening to Christianne Stotijn and Julius Drake’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s At the Ball, you can sense a minor miracle unfolding. As singer and pianist tug telepathically here and there at this delicate music’s tempo, the world seems momentarily to stop turning.
Not bad for Track One – a whole two-and-a-half minutes into this full-length new disc of Tchaikovsky songs from Stotijn and Drake. And things don’t get any less magical. The emotional weight of these moving performances is in their lightness, delicacy and sensitivity: a perfect alignment of approach from Stotijn and her accompanist. That, in turn, is prompted by a delectable selection of songs that often seem in their straightforward designs like Tchaikovsky ‘distilled’ – travelling, you could say, straight to the composer’s heart. ‘They show a side of Tchaikovsky which not many people know of,’ says Stotijn. ‘They are the most intimate and tender evidence of a deep, inner world’
In fact, Tchaikovsky’s songs are arguably the forgotten gems of his catalogue, described by legendary observer of musical progression Nicolas Slonimsky as ‘the most poignant creations of his genius’. In the 20 works chosen by Stotijn and Drake are some which journey to emotional heights and some that stand in motionless melancholy. But that typically Slavic sadness is omnipresent, and it fuses with Stotijn’s perfect Russian diction and colourful vocal palette to create some acutely moving moments.
We might know Tchaikovsky for his elaborate symphonies and concertos – music that strives towards philosophical goals by urging its way through complex and compelling orchestral themes and techniques. If those works are Tchaikovsky’s feature films, these songs appear like a succession of beautifully framed photographs; each the musical capturing of a single moment and feeling. In The Fearful Moment – set to a text by Tchaikovsky hlmse1f – the composer captures in microcosm the fear before a confession of love; ‘you’ll either stab me in the heart or show me heaven’ Stotijn sings, matching the increasing fervour of the music with a delivery of extraordinary emotional detail. Even the audible anatomy of her performance impassioned breathing and the cautious ping of her consonants – captures the mood of the text.
Stotijn’s voice is like chrome: it has solid weight, brightness and a capacity to reflect dark colours in appropriate music – as in the twisting, Slavic melodies of The Bride’s Lament. Her concentration on every syllable and note can have you in the palm of her hand, but she never over-sings – the big moment in The Sun has Set is all the more affecting for its impeccable control, demonstrable in the full breadth of the mezzo’s range.
So much of the wonderment of these songs, though, is in the eloquent machinery of Tchaikovsky’s accompaniments. Stotijn and Drake approach the more simple patterns of At the Ball, Lullaby, The Lights Were Being Dimmed and Why? as a blank canvas on which to project the humanity that’s only implied by the notes: all the emotional conveyance is in their gentle miniscule pauses and subtle emphases. But elsewhere the music is more rhapsodic, and the two musicians deal with the complexities equally convincingly. Mild Stars Looked Down, in which optimism peers out through a descending melody, eventually builds through throbbing triplets to a perfectly nuanced climax, while the interpretative challenges of The Bride’s Lament and its pauses, melismas and rhapsodic accompaniment are met with great skill.
But beyond the heart-stopping detail of these performances is the delight of discovering such wonderful little slices of Tchaikovsky. If there’s one thing he excels at, it’s melody – so perhaps it’s no surprise that his songs should be so special. And in these performances, Tchaikovsky the song composer has the best possible advocates.
Listening Notes
• Eloquent machinery: In Lullaby, Tchaikovsky’s accompaniment gently turns over an understated harmonic and rhythmic pattern – it is an exquisite bedrock for any vocal solo.
• Vocal tone and control: My Genius, My Angel, My Friendl calls for acutely sensitive singing: listen to Stotijn’s vowel sounds, gentle crescendos and the disappearance of her voice into nothingness at the song’s ghostly conclusion.
• Rhythmic freedom: In The Lights Were Being Dimmed Stotijn and Drake tug at the music’s tempo, creating a feeling of unearthly space and passion in the process.
David Shengold, Operanwes.com, Oct 2009
Onyx’s very enjoyable disc should serve to introduce many American listeners to the fine artistry and beautiful voice of Christianne Stotijn. This superb Dutch contralto has appeared chiefly in concert, though she’s done a few Baroque operas onstage: North American appearances include dates with the Boston and Chicago Symphonies, plus a Washington recital.
The youngest exponent of a great national tradition, Stotijn happily does not share in two common besetting sins of many gifted Netherlandish predecessors – unmoored pitch and utter lack of high notes. Her range presents no problems, and her control in fact proves quite remarkable: trained as a violinist, she commands admirable precision in both phrasing and attack. Tonally – if not in timbre – her voice boasts an electric sheen somewhat reminiscent of Tatiana Troyanos’s early recordings.
The CD encompasses twenty of Tchaikovsky’s beautiful art songs (”romansy“), ranging from beloved chestnuts to genuine rarities. Stotijn brings ravishing soft tone to the moving, rarely heard, “My Genius, My Angel, My Friend” and the heartbreaking, catchy “Lullaby” (Opus 36, No.1). Julius Drake accompanies with liquid tone and, when needed, bravura. More than occasionally, the pair adopts unusually slow tempos, for example in the initial song, “At the Ball.” In this case, they make a familiar number particularly haunting, but sometimes (as in “Not a word”) one wants a bit more forward motion.
Stotijn’s mastery of Russian vowel reduction and consonant softening is certainly not that of a native speaker. This becomes especially evident in rapid passages; however, she has been well coached and does far better than many non-Russophone artists in this material. That she knows the import of every word is never in doubt. Those requiring 100% authentic diction in this repertory can seek out fine recordings by Arkhipova, Dolukhanova and Tourel (to stick with mezzos), plus among current singers Borodina and Semenchuk. But for general listeners, Stotijn’s virtues may far outweigh such considerations.