United Kingdom Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Pavel Haas, Berlioz: Christian Gerhaher (baritone), Gerold Huber (piano). Wigmore Corridor, London, 20.1.2024. (CSa)
Fauré – ‘Le papillon et la fleur’, Op.1 No.1; ‘A Clymène’ from 5 mélodies ‘de Venise’, Op.58; ‘Les berceaux’, Op.23 No.1; ‘Spleen’, Op.51 No.3; ‘Danseuse; from Mirages, Op.113; ‘Clair de lune’, Op.46 No.2; ‘Notre amour’, Op.23 No.2
Tchaikovsky – ‘Once more as earlier than, alone’, Op.73 No.6; ‘Take my coronary heart away’; ‘My genius, my angel my buddy’; ‘Don’t imagine, my buddy’, Op.6 No.1; ‘Cradle music’, Op.16 No.1; ‘The primary assembly’, Op.63 No.4; ‘As over burning embers’, Op.25 No.2; ‘Not a phrase, O my buddy’, Op.6 No.2
Chopin – Mazurka in A minor, Op.17 No.4; Mazurka in C-sharp minor, Op.30 No.4; Mazurka in E minor, Op.41 No.2; Ballade No.4 in F minor, Op.52
Haas – 4 Songs on Chinese language Poetry
Berlioz – Les nuits d’été, Op.7
Though appearances at Wigmore Corridor by Munich-based baritone Christian Gerhaher and his long-time piano accompanist and former classmate Gerold Huber will not be rare, they’re pink letter days for connoisseurs of the artwork music repertoire. In 2016, Gerhaher gained the Wigmore Medal – awarded to musicians who’ve made a major contribution to their artwork. A pupil of the late Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, he combines a honeyed voice with flawless diction and a compelling reward for narrative, whereas Huber invariably proves a sentient and splendidly intuitive associate.
Their newest providing consisted of a richly diversified and intensely colored compilation of songs by Fauré, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, and Pavel Haas, interleaved with a collection of dazzling Chopin Mazurkas and the majestic Ballade No.4. This considerate programme supplied Gerhaher not solely with the chance to impress together with his linguistic expertise – whether or not singing in French, Russian or Czech – but in addition served to display the total breadth of his emotional vary. It additionally allowed Huber to emerge from his supportive keyboard function to that of virtuoso soloist.
Opening with an intoxicating account of ‘Le Papillon et la fleur’ – a poem by Victor Hugo and the primary of Fauré’s seven songs – Gerhaher moved with consummate ease from his resonant decrease register to a light-weight, liquid head voice, delicately conjuring the picture of Hugo’s ‘heavenly butterfly’, flitting from flower to flower till borne away on a delicate breeze. He additionally caught completely that distinctively Gallic high quality of sensual melancholy which pervades such songs as ‘A Clymène’, ‘Spleen’, and ‘Clair de lune’, all settings of poems by Paul Verlaine.
Fauré deeply admired and corresponded together with his ‘grasp and buddy’ Tchaikovsky, and it was an interesting collection of eight hardly ever heard songs by Tchaikovsky which got here subsequent. These heartrending compositions had been performed and sung with the utmost sensitivity. Gerhaher’s tender account of ‘My genius, my angel, my buddy’, and ‘Cradle music’ contrasted dramatically with virtually operatic outbursts of Slavic grief and fervour in ‘Don’t imagine, my buddy’, whereas Huber’s intensive expertise as a music pianist lent supportive voice to the expressive cadence of the Russian verse.
Probably Tchaikovsky would have had no objection to sharing a programme of his works with Fauré, however he might have felt much less keen about showing on the identical invoice as Chopin, in whom (in response to one biographer) ‘he discovered a sure sickliness of expression in addition to an extra of subjective sensibility’. Such reservations would absolutely have been dispelled by Huber’s fiery and uplifting efficiency of three of Chopin’s Mazurkas: these in A minor, Op.17 No.4, C-sharp minor, Op.30 No.4, and E minor, Op.41 No.2, every of which is a sturdy expression of resilience and optimism.
The second half started with 4 Songs on Chinese language Poetry by the Jewish Czech composer Pavel Haas, written in 1944 whereas imprisoned in Terezìn focus camp, six months earlier than he perished within the gasoline chambers of Auschwitz. Haas by some means discovered refuge in these achingly unhappy Tang Dynasty texts, stuffed with craving for dwelling and family members. Two of the songs are set to fragments from the St. Wenceslaus Chorale, the patron saint of the Czech individuals, and the refined insistence of Gerhaher and Huber’s efficiency completely captured Haas’s poignant name for freedom.
Persevering with the theme of freedom, and the transcendent energy of music to convey it, Huber selected certainly one of Chopin’s most dramatic and more and more advanced compositions, the mighty Ballade No.4 in F minor. The musicologist Timothy Judd reminds us that in September 1939, when the Germans marched into Poland and earlier than the radio stations had been silenced by the Nazis, Chopin’s music, together with this Ballade, was performed consistently over loudspeakers and have become the musical embodiment of resistance. On this in any other case glorious efficiency, Huber’s heavy use of the maintain pedal produced a somewhat muffled sound, and there have been quite a few passages that lacked crisp articulation. Moreover, his reliance on sheet music and a sympathetic page-turner led to much less rubato – that important high quality of fleeting spontaneity – one has come to count on from the best Chopin interpreters. Nonetheless, Huber efficiently conveyed the fervour and grandeur of this terribly expressive work.
The centre piece of the recital got here on the very finish: a memorable account of one of the vital stunning musical chronicles of affection and loss ever written, Berlioz’s song-cycle Les nuits d’eté. Sustaining good tempo and phrasing, and displaying a large palette of tonal colors, Gerhaher introduced every of Gautier’s evocative poems to life. His burnished baritone gave ‘Villanelle’ a dreamy lyricism, and lovingly caressed every verse of ‘Le spectre de la rose’. A ghostly ‘Sur les legunes’ gave approach to searing unhappiness in ‘Absence’. Though some might have missed the luscious depth of the orchestral association of this work, the diminished piano-vocal model, as initially conceived by Berlioz and so brilliantly realised by Gerhaher and Huber, greater than sufficed. It touched the soul.
Chris Sallon
