A Flair for Drama

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Christopher Maltman is a spellbinder — a British baritone with a voice at times honeyed, assertive, suave, dramatic, ethereal, and gutsy. Along with pianist Julius Drake, an appealingly muscular presence with superb fingers and a musical imagination equal to that of the singer, Maltman charmed continually. The duo wooed and won their audience in a well-chosen, artfully arranged San Francisco Performances program at Herbst Theatre on Sunday evening.

With all the qualities his voice possesses, none is more impressive than his ability to change vocal color with the speed of an eyeblink. Schubert’s Totengräbers Heimweh (Grave-digger’s homesickness), Hugo Wolf’s Der Rattenfänger (The rat catcher) and Der Feuerreiter (The fire-rider) were anguished, commanding, and horrifying in their turn, as Maltman and Drake blazed their way through the rapidly changing emotional terrain. The singer’s excellent diction and unerring rhythmic pulse drove a rollicking drinking song by Peter Warlock (alias Philip Heseltine), Captain Stratton’s Fancy.

He turned his gentler, lighter side to a lovely performance of Wolf’s Der Gärtner and made the gardener’s offering of flowers to his beloved princess as she rides by — “Nimm tausend für eine/ Nimm alle dafür!” (Take a thousand for one/ Take all of them!) — touchingly, sweetly deferential. And he sang Schubert’s sublime second setting of Goethe’s poem Wanderers Nachtlied (Wanderer’s night-song) as an unearthly benediction to the grave-digger’s longing for death in the preceding song, in which the man actually does die in the final stanza.

Urbanity and Brio to Burn

Yet Maltman’s very ability to pilot his rapidly changing dramatic colors through song after song, which served so well for the demonstrative German songs and the opening group of Warlock, undermined his treatment of French songs by Claude Debussy and Henri Duparc. Certainly Maltman’s French diction, like all his diction, is excellent, and his voice possesses the needed sophistication, urbanity, and poise for French mélodie. What his mercurial vocal temperament does not allow him to do — at least at present — is to inhabit the protagonists of these elusive songs while at the same time maintaining a distance from them.

For example, in Duparc’s Le Manoir de Rosemonde (The manor house of Rosamond), Maltman depicts energetically, from moment to moment, the weary would-be lover’s frantic ride through an “arduous route, through swamps and overgrown paths” in his attempt to reach his unattainable Rosemond. But the journey lies in the past. The man is addressing another person, while reliving his experience anew. As painful as it may be in his recounting to feel what he felt, it is not exactly the same as it was the first time.

The singer must communicate the lapse of time from an experience already past. “J’ai parcouru ce triste monde” (I have traveled through this sad world) should be sung with wisdom hard-gained, “sans découvrir/ Le bleu manoir de Rosemonde” (Without discovering the blue manor of Rosamond). The anger and bitterness that Maltman employed is not enough; we must be able to see that this man has failed, as the “you” he addresses will surely fail, as all men fail. Perhaps it takes less energy and more ironic distance — less is more — and in time maybe Maltman will find the right “stance” for the subtlety of mélodie.

For now, though, it is enough that Maltman is both the gentle singer of colorful bubbles of melody in Peter Warlock’s first song, The Singer, which opened the recital, and the bold, determined, ruthless rat catcher in the closing piece, the singer who entraps everything from rats to maidens with whatever song it takes to do so.

In his two splendid encores, Maltman returned to the qualities of mercurial humor and brio that make him the excellent singer that he is. His (and everyone’s) beloved British duo Flanders and Swann, whom he calls geniuses, furnished him with the pièce de résistance: a love-song about a right-handed honeysuckle and a left-handed bindweed, who, alas, cannot marry because they can’t intertwine. And finally came Debussy’s boisterous setting of François Villon’s “La ballade des femmes de Paris,” with its refrain: “Il n’est bon bec que de Paris,” which, freely translated, means, “Only French women have the gift of gab.”

Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, is retired from more than three decades of singing in opera and concerts in the U.S. and abroad.