San Francisco Classical Voice

Baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and pianist Steven Blier gave such satisfying performances that their recital at Herbst Theater last Monday immediately inspires talk about the music itself rather than discussion in superlatives of their performances. The program itself became a revelation, leading to heights and depths of inward and outward manifestations of its theme: journeying. It was enlightening, somehow, even transporting.

That said, let it be noted that Holzmair and Blier are superb musicians, sensitive to every nuance of music and text, artists whose technical mastery allows them to do whatever they choose. What they chose was to reveal, again and again, the peculiar workings of the lied: text illuminated and laid bare by music.

Schubert, who knows all about journeys, opened and closed the program with two groups of three songs each, embracing the evening and hovering over it like a gentle ghost. At the program's center were songs of Krenek, a different sort of traveler, with Mahler, Vaughn Williams and Wolf providing intriguing by-ways.

To start, there was Schubert's famous miller's apprentice from Die schöne Müllerin ("The Fair Maid of the Mill"), setting out on his travels full of hope, bursting with energy, in Das Wandern ("Wandering"). Familiar as the song is, Holzmair gave us not only the youth, vigor and high spirits we expected, but also the callow young man who will shortly fall desperately in love with a rather insipid girl and come to a bad end. There was something almost too bluff-hearty in Holzmair's rendition of the first few verses, befitting the protagonist.

At the fourth stanza, "Die Steine selbst, so schwer sie sind" ("The stones, even, as heavy as they are"), Blier bounded in with a heavy, rollicking motion in the piano. One could see the cocksureness of the young apprentice as he invoked all of Nature to join with him in a venture that could only be, he thinks, a fortunate one. Before the final stanza, "O Wandern, Wandern, meine Lust" ("O wandering, my delight"), singer and pianist paused, and in Holzmair's withheld breath and shining eyes was the boy's anticipatory thrill at the journey to come.

Schubert's other wanderers--older, wiser, wearier--were there too, embodying the great Romantic theme of the lonely outcast, the homeless wayfarer, the artist who is at home nowhere. The pianist's gentle, melancholy walking theme in Der Wanderer an den Mond ("The Wanderer's Address to the Moon") underpinned the protagonist's touching envy of the moon, that wanderer at home everywhere in the heavens. Holzmair, for his part, gave us, in the single word "Heimat" ("homeland") all we needed to feel of nostalgia and yearning.

The final line of Schubert's Der Pilgrim -- "Und das Dort ist niemals hier" ("And the There is never here")--is repeated three times. Holzmair took us on a journey of those four utterances, each revealing a completely different comprehension of the pilgrim's yearning for his destination. Towards the other end of the program, the pilgrim is answered in almost Haiku fashion, in Goethe's moving words and Schubert's magnificently simple Wanderers Nachtlied II ("Wanderer's Night Song II")--the treetops are at peace, the air is still, the birds are silent; wait, soon you too will rest. Holzmair graced this brief message of solace with an exquisite pulling-back on the word "balde" ("soon"); the singer knows what the wanderer does not yet: that "rest" will mean death.

Holzmair's ability to convey many meanings in one utterance came beautifully into play in the two Mahler selections from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer). In Ging heut Morgen übers Feld ("This morning I walked through the field"), the young man, unlucky in love, wanders out into a field of beautiful flowers and birdsong. The bluebells ring their bells in a morning-greeting to him, as he says: "Wird's nicht eine schöne Welt? schöne Welt?" ("Is the world not growing lovely?") The baritone managed to convey both the youth's delight in the beauty of the morning and his pain that such beauty is not for him. This is artistry.

Ralph Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel, to poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, are replete with gorgeous melody, which Holzmair embraced fully, as any singer must. But to fervent expression of melody was added the foreign speaker's sensitivity to English, which lends a distance from the language of the poetry and fosters a re-examination of that language. Words that we know and take for granted in our native language are, to a non-native speaker, full of new possibilities.

Holzmair, ever responsive to textual and musical nuances, thus uncovered poignancy and intensity in, for example, the lines "In the day's dusk end/ When the shades ascend/ Let her wake to the kiss of a tender friend/To render again and receive" (from "Let Beauty Awake"). Singer and pianist seemed to be weaving newly-made strands of text and music together before our very ears, so fresh did they sound. Holzmair's voice is so susceptible of color that one could swear he was creating the very harmonies heard simultaneously in the piano--supporting, enriching, molding them even as Blier was receiving and echoing them, a mirror image of the voice.

With such acute powers at hand, one would have thought that the two songs of Hugo Wolf, Fussreise ("Journey on Foot") and Auf einer Wanderung ("On a Walk"), would have told more strikingly than they did. Wolf is the master setter of text, the revealer of emotion in the word by means of music. And yet the songs seemed strangely out of place in that program, perhaps because these texts did not probe as deeply as the other ones; there wasn't as much to mine. The fault was not the performers'. They let the sub-texts of the songs drive (or hold back)the tempos they chose, creating some lovely moments.

The pièces de résistance, in a markedly different mood but on a similar theme, were the selections from Ernst Krenek's Reisebuch aus den österreichischen Alpen ("Memoirs of a Journey Through the Austrian Alps"), with texts by the composer. They sounded like journal entries set to music, with a flavor akin to Darius Milhaud's settings of a farm machinery catalogue (Machines agricoles). The songs were delightful, moving, and imaginative, ranging in feel from the harmonic richness of Schubert and Mahler to the lyricism of French turn-of-the-century. Much word-painting, such as raindrops (plentiful in the Alps) and a train in motion as the protagonist returns home.

Most amusing was the depiction of tourists struggling up and down ("Auf und ab"), weary but intrepid, exclaiming at every moment, "Ach, wie schön! Ach, wie schön!" ("O how lovely!"), while at the same time writing their postcards, seeing nothing. The accompaniment here was ponderous, lugubrious, and funny, in turns.

Blier introduced the Krenek piece eloquently. In his address to the audience he requested that there be no applause at the end of the group, as he said, "so that Schubert might carry on the theme of wandering." In the interim between the Krenek and the final Schubert set, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop, so rapt was the audience.

Balancing the opening song of the evening, the group concluded with the cheerful Abschied ("Farewell") from Schubert's last group of songs, Schwanengesang (Swan Song), as the singer takes leave of town, trees, gardens and girls--"I know you have never seen me sad/Nor will you now, as I depart."

Schumann's Wanderung ("Wandering") and Schubert's Wanderers Nachtlied I were the moving encores. The song recital is alive and well in the third millenium.

(Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, has performed in this country and abroad, in opera and recital. She teaches singing at U.C. Davis and Holy Names College.)

©2000 Stephanie Friedman, all rights reserved