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RECITAL REVIEW
Mismatch for Subtle Wolf November 11, 2001
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By Stephanie Friedman
One of the supremely beautiful songs in Hugo Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch (Italian Songbook), presented in its entirety at Hertz Hall on Sunday afternoon by baritone Bo Skovhus, mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager, and pianist Donald Runnicles, is "Sterb' ich, so hüllt in Blumen meine Glieder" ("If I should die, shroud my limbs in flowers"). Skovhus aimed at the heart of this song and achieved one of the rare satisfying moments of a concert that, on the whole, would not have pleased the composer, a severe critic of performers who missed the mark. The two attractive singers were paired as a kind of attraction in themselves, obscuring the musical excellence and emotional richness of the songs. Worse, Kirchschlager's mugging during and between her songs (as well as studying her words while Skovhus was singing) would probably have sent Wolf tearing out of the hall in a white-hot fury.
The songs, 46 in all, are verse translations by Paul Heyse (1830-1914) of mainly Italian rispetti, a poetic form that combined popular elements and high art. They are thus not folk songs and not to be interpreted as such. Add to this that the composer, himself a master of nuanced settings, was extraordinarily sensitive to words and the emotions beneath them, and you have an invitation to the performers to give the most elegant, discriminating interpretations possible, an invitation that was not, for the most part, accepted by the recital's three participants.
The songs were rearranged to achieve maximum opportunity for dialogue between the singers, which generally worked well as a dramatic device but which also encouraged overplaying and oversinging and thus perpetrated injuries. Even the humorous pieces do not fully succeed when performed merely as broad comedy. By the time the Italian Songbook was composed (1890-91, resuming in 1896) Wolf was a master of his craft. Voice and piano often delineate independently two or more different thoughts, necessitating on the part of both partners the utmost sensitivity to each other at every moment. Each in turn must literally play with the suspensions, syncopations and dynamics in an eminently musical collaboration.
To restrict interpretation mostly to broad or exaggerated vocal and facial gestures, as Kirchschlager did in the greater number of her songs, is to miss all of this musical subtlety, resulting in a kind of vocal infidelity to pitches and line, sometimes obscuring them altogether. It is an intensely unmusical approach, especially in Wolf. Nevertheless, such audience-pleasing gestures can work well. The donkey-like octaves in the piano and Kirchschlager's raised hand abruptly signaling "silence" on the word "schweig" in the over-the-top song "Schweig einmal still, du garst'ger Schwätzer dort" ("Do be quiet, you wretched chatterer") were amusing. In contrast, by using a more varied palette, singer and pianist made a lovely thing out of the Schumannesque "Wohl kenn' ich Euren Stand, der nicht gering" ("I know how high your station is"), something that did not occur often enough in the recital. Runnicles' lack of Wolfian delicacy undid "Heb auf dein blondes Haupt und schlafe nicht" ("Lift up your fair head and do not sleep"). He and Skovhus went at such a clip that the singer could develop neither the song's elegance nor its understated passion. In the early songs, Runnicles and the singers sounded in utterly different worlds, neither of them Wolf's. Later in the program, however, he seemed to be listening better. Blend and balance improved, and the pianist added greatly to the success of "Sterb' ich", mentioned above, and "Und willst du deinen Liebsten sterben sehen" ("And if you would see your lover die"), another exquisite song, as well as several others sung by Skovhus. The baritone delivered the affecting "Nun lass uns Frieden schliessen, liebstes Leben" ("Now let us make peace, my dearest love") earnestly if not quite persuasively, but failed along with Runnicles to make much of the many delightful encounters of piano and voice in "Wenn du mich den Augen streifst und lacht" ("When you glance at me and laugh").
The timbres of both pianist and singers were basically too brash and colorless for Wolf. Runnicles's accompaniments relied more on forthright, sometimes downright loud, playing than on subtlety. Kirchschlager's voice is edgy and broad, a good comic opera voice (a great Cherubino, for example), but her quality lacks the intimacy and subtlety that is the essence of Wolf. Skovhus's voice is no less operatic and cannot be called warm but he succeeded in scaling it down for the quieter love songs like the above-mentioned "Sterb' ich" and "Und willst du deinem Liebsten". He could sing Wolf's delicately anguished chromatics tellingly and accurately, as in "Der Mond hat eine schwere Klag' erhoben" ("The moon has brought a heavy charge"), but he often straightened and pressed his tone in an attempt at emotion, for example on the word "Sonnenschein" in the otherwise beautiful "Sterb' ich". At such times the voice sounded insincere and his pitches went sharp. Kirchschlager was at her best in angry pieces, such as the deservedly well-known "Was soll der Zorn, mein Schatz, der dich erhitzt?" ("Why this hot anger, my love?"), which can tolerate Kirchschlager's melodramatic rendering. In humorous pieces like "Mein Liebster hat zu Tische mich geladen" ("My sweetheart invited me to dinner"), Kirchschlager showed a fine comic flair. But she failed to invest "Ihr jungen Leute, die ihr zieht ins Felt" ("You young men going off to war") with any of the touching solicitude with which the young girl asks the other soldiers to look after her sweetheart on the battlefield, because "er ist's ja nicht gewohnt"("he's not used to it"). In another of the collection's beauties, "Wir haben beide lange Zeit geschwiegen" ("For a long time we have both been silent"), which tells of making up after a quarrel, Kirchschlager couldn't manage the light, knowing touch the song demands. The last four pieces in the rearranged order were arch and spirited and made sense in their dialogue format, moving the program smartly to an end in the famous "Ich hab in Penna einen Liebsten wohnen" ("I have one lover living in Penna"), a sort of reduced version of Leporello's catalogue song from "Don Giovanni". Kirchschlager did this winningly, and Runnicles and the piano went out in a blaze of glory with the vigorous postlude. (Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, has performed in this country andabroad, in opera and recital. She teaches singing at U.C. Davis and Holy Names College.) ©2001 Stephanie Friedman, all rights reserved |
