San Francisco Classical Voice

March 14, 1999

Angelika Kirschschlager

Angelika Kirschschlager, who gave a recital in UC Berkeley's Hertz Hall on Sunday, is a puzzle. An attractive mezzo-soprano with a robust voice and a soaring career in both opera and recital, she gives every appearance of being an energetic, engaged singer who likes to program music not ordinarily heard on the recital stage. But what strikes the ear is curiously flat, monotonous, and un-engaged; and the less-than-usually-heard pieces she presents are too often not of high quality.

Her programs have no emotional center, and even the interesting sets of songs are delivered with no variety of color or expression. Kirchschlager is still quite young--in her early 30's--and it may be that she does not trust her voice enough to color it; nor does she seem to want to challenge herself, which can also be a function of her young years. But the result on the concert platform is disconcerting.

Sunday afternoon's recital was a case in point. Four folk songs of Brahms opened the program. They were light, strophic, and similar. For a vocal warm-up they make sense. But then what follows should delve deeper, make more demands on singer and audience, and this the Beethoven set of four songs in a folkish vein most assuredly did not do. The Mignon song is perhaps the weakest among the lieder settings of the same poem in German-- Kennst du das Land? ("Do You Know the Land?"). Ich liebe dich" ("I Love You") appears in beginning song books for singing classes and would be acceptable as a foil for more difficult and complex songs; but on a program consisting largely of pieces on the same level of simplicity (as was also the case with the lullabies on the second half), this adds up to a staggering puerility.

Two-thirds of the first half being over at this point, Ms. Kirchschlager then presented five songs from Brahms' op. 57, beautiful settings to poems of Georg Friedrich Daumer. In the delicate, subtle Wenn du nur zuweilen laechelst, Daumer has translated a poem from the Persian of the poet Hafiz: "If you will just smile at me once in a while, I can bear the pain you cause me", he says. It is a call, in Brahms' sensitive setting, for the utmost sensitivity on the part of the interpreters. But here, as with other such opportunities, Ms. Kirchschlager's one-level delivery left the listener profoundly unsatisfied.

Unbewegte, laue Luft ("Mild, Unagitated Air") is almost a scena, moving from tranquillity to highest arousal: "Float to me, do not tarry!/Come, oh come, that we may give/Each other heavenly satisfaction!" Brahms' friends blushed for him on account of these songs. But for all her energy and body English, Ms. Kirchschlager conveyed neither tranquillity nor passion; neither the sense of where she was going with the song, nor what she was about when she got there. It was all forte or piano, and not very affecting piano at that.

After the intermission came the lullabies. In the lullaby repertoire there are some stunning songs: Milhaud, Britten, Bartok, to name just three, have varied, interesting, challenging versions, little heard. But the lullabies Ms. Kirchschlager chose contained a Wiegenlied, D 498 by Schubert, who also wrote a much more interesting and subtle one in his D304 Wiegenlied; Aaron Copland's setting of The Little Horses, sung in Kirchschlager's excellent English; Strauss' Muttertandelei ("Mother-talk") which, once again, would have been an amusing foil to more serious lullabies, but amidst this somewhat treacly group only served to up the number of empty calories; Brahms' "Sandmaennchen" ("Sandman") --ditto--(perhaps Ms. Kirchschlager wanted to bring to the stage the lullabies she had been singing to her young child); and Gladys Rich's American Lullaby, which I can imagine sung after a Park Avenue dinner, in the living-room, with brandy and cigars, by one of the guests who used to sing.

I did not want to hear Dvorak's Sieben Zigeunermelodien, op. 55 ("Seven Gypsy Songs"), a rich set, after the thin appetizers that had preceded, with the middle of the meal missing. I needn't have worried. Ms. Kirchschlager delivered these songs, in a German translation made from the original Czech by the author, Adolph Heyduk, with much the same passionless energy that had infused the earlier part of the concert. There were no surprises, alas. These songs are tailor-made for a mezzo with deep amplitude of voice and rich, dark tones and overtones. Kirchschlager revealed neither. Though she is billed and sings as a mezzo, at times she sounded a little strained and pushed at the lower pitches. Both the pianist, Helmut Deutsch, and singer ended the set strongly, however, and the audience demanded and got three encores: an operetta aria, Im Chambre separée ("A Separate Room"), by Heuberger; the scarily amusing A Charm, from Benjamin Britten's "A Charm of Lullabies", which Ms. Kirchschlager dedicated to all those parents who have ever tried to quiet a crying baby; and a song by Erich Korngold that she sang when last here.

Deutsch was an able accompanist. He tried, at times, to introduce some variety of color into the songs, but Kirchschlager did not follow suit. He might be worth hearing under more challenging circumstances.

(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.)

©1999 Stephanie Friedman, all rights reserved