San Francisco Classical Voice

The performance of "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" (Where the beautiful trumpets blow) was masterful, beginning with the singer's frequently used "backswing" from the piano out to the audience: he pivots his whole body while taking in enough breath, it would seem, for several phrases, as if he were sucking in with the air all the thoughts and emotions he intended to express. "Das ist der Herzallerliebste dein / Steh auf und lass mich zu dir ein!" (It is your darling / Arise and let me come in to you!), tenderly sings the soldier. Persuasive and loving as his delivery was, at the same time Goerne imbued this phrase with something unearthly, as if the lover senses this farewell might be his last. He is already in love with "Die grüne Heide, die ist so weit" (The green heath that is so broad), the meadow where he might well fall (or perhaps has already fallen) in battle. "Da ist mein Haus, von grünem Rasen" (There is my house of green grass) he sings pensively — the last phrase rendered by Goerne as if by a ghost. The song seemed, suddenly, ambiguous: is the soldier already dead and simply returning in spirit, or is he prescient? Mahler's music invites either reading, and Goerne communicated both possibilities.

In the jocular "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" (St. Anthony's Sermon to the Fishes), little head-nods from Goerne indicated how pleased each fish was with the sermon, though each goes back to his old ways in the end: "Die Predigt hat g'fallen / Sie bleiben wie alle" (The sermon has pleased them / They remain the same). Goerne tossed off "hat g'fallen" lazily but knowingly, as if to say, "Well, what would you expect?"

Every one of the Wunderhorn songs was wonderfully realized, but the stunner among them was the last one, "Revelge" (Reveille). In a voice that seemed to have grown older, harsher (but without roughness), and laced with acid, Goerne, working seamlessly with Rieger, delivered a most bitter, inwardly-wounded account of the song. The piano hammered out the relentless tattoo of the drum with just the proper weight. Goerne's voice took on a delicate plangency at the mention of the sweetheart's house — once again he used minimal effects to achieve the nearness of the girl. At the very end, Rieger let the final chord die in its own time, which seemed endless. When he and Goerne stood to take their bows, it looked as if the bite and anger of the piece were still working in the lineaments of his face. The two of them clearly mirrored to the audience the marks of a special performance, and the audience gratefully received them.

Wagner's Wesendonck-Lieder, to poems of his (almost) mistress Mathilde Wesendonck (it is likely they never consummated the relationship), are usually sung by a woman, but after hearing Goerne sing them, I can't imagine why. They are the musical reworkings by a visionary genius of an overwrought, adolescent set of poems. Wagner made them his own and used them to work out some studies for Tristan und Isolde. They bear his stamp and no longer, mercifully, the poet's.

The program closed with two more superb examples of Goerne's and Rieger's individual and combined prowess in handling these songs: Rieger's sounding, at a barely-heard triple piano, of the final chord of the postlude of "Träume" (Dreams) — the last of the five songs; and Goerne's harrowed yet consoling final phrase of the same song, "Und dann sinken in die Gruft" (And then sink into the grave). He sang "Gruft" as if staring death in the face, awe-struck but wholly its match.

Encore? Hard to believe there could have been one suitable after this, but Goerne found it: Beethoven's second version of "An die Hoffnung" (To Hope), opus 94, a long, dramatic, episodic paean to hope. Not an inappropriate way to end a concert that had struck all the chords of human experience.