| RECITAL REVIEW Still and Powerful May 5, 2002
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By Stephanie Friedman A powerful musical intelligence was at work in the slight, oddly
vulnerable-looking body of German soprano Christine Schäfer at
Hertz Hall on Sunday afternoon. Wearing an outfit that was at the same
time romantic and business-like — a filmy scarlet-flowered overdress and
slim black pants — she maneuvered herself slowly but smoothly to the center
of the stage on high, spiked heels, accompanied by her pianist, Ted
Taylor. Standing calmly, arms falling most of the time in a gentle arc at
her sides, she delivered a demanding program in a steely, focused voice
that never lacked for expression.
Schäfer took a difficult route from the very beginning, eschewing
more ingratiating, spectacular or light-hearted songs to open with a
subdued group of "women's songs", settings by Schubert of texts from Sir
Walter Scott's "The Legend of Montrose" and "Lady of the Lake". Unshowy
these songs may have been, but they nevertheless revealed the
concentration of intention, feeling and intellect beneath the
undemonstrative demeanor of the singer.
The third "Ellens Gesang" ("Ellen's song"), "Ave Maria," was reborn through
Schäfer's superb legato and attention to exact rhythms. A word
like "Rosendüfte" ("scent of roses"), with its dotted sixteenths
and rapid thirty-seconds, sailed over the harp-like accompaniment, its
disconsolate ripples barely troubling the surface of the legato. The
singer luxuriated in the word "Jungfrau" in the phrase "O Jungfrau, eine
Jungfrau ruft!"("O maiden, a maiden calls"), pressing lovingly into the
repetition just deeply enough to fully communicate the pathos of the young
Ellen's prayer.
Taylor, whose playing was uniformly musicianly and often heroic, came onstage after the Schubert to prepare the piano for George Crumb's Apparition. This threnody built on lines excerpted from Whitman's elegaic poem on the death of Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is, like the poem, an exploration of and meditation on the various attributes of death: "O vast and well-veil'd death"; "dark mother"; "strong deliveress"; "lovely and soothing death." In the larger poem, the words are put into the mouth of the thrush singing in the darkness. Crumb's wordless vocalises, interspersed among the stanzas, are partly warblings and unvoiced dentalized or gutteral consonants — appropriate bird sounds — and partly melismas and hums (there was even, I believe, a modified goat-trill!). The pianist sometimes strums the strings, sometimes plucks them, sometimes strums the strings while playing the keys, as in stanza number five, in which the piano also produces sudden "American-sounding" chords that move in a slow jazzy progression up the scale, as if a revival meeting were in progress, or Stephen Foster had stumbled in. The vocal and expressive range of the six stanzas and three vocalises is varied. "Dark" is sung low, while the following word, "mother" leaps into the stratosphere; "Come lovely and soothing death" starts with a series of falling major seconds that diminish like sighs. In the stanza beginning "Approach strong deliveress!", Crumb takes his cue from the word "joyously" in "I joyously sing the dead", but it is a frenetic joy. The lines that follow, "Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee / Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death" sound as if the singer had glimpsed the terrifying end of days. There is no comfort here.
The ending words of the sixth and final stanza, ". . . nestling close to thee," are sung three times, each time more softly. By the third utterance Schäfer's voice was at the softest possible level, but with a fine wire of perfectly phonated tone at the center. Schäfer and Taylor were consummately assured and persuasive in this expansive piece, which is written beautifully for both singer and pianist. A soprano singing Schumann's Dichterliebe ("A Poet's Love") is bound to have to sacrifice some of the beauty of her voice in the more bitterly angry songs, such as "Ich grolle nicht" ("I bear no grudge") and "Die alten, bösen Lieder" ("The bad old songs"). Credit must be given to Schäfer for attempting to give songs like these their full emotional strength. But inevitably a voice whose meat lies in the upper regions will not be able to encompass the lower, grittier tones, and this was the case with Schäfer. She pushed some chest pitches, which sounded rough and ugly in comparison to the silvery stream of notes that normally poured out of her. But on balance what she lost in a few places was more than made up for in the sensitivity and understanding with which she sang, for example, the final lines of "Und wüssten's die Blumen, die kleinen" ("If the little flowers knew"): "Sie alle können's nicht wissen . . ." ("But none of them can know / One only knows my pain / For it was she who broke my heart . . . in two"). The bitterness of these words by Heine is rendered twice bitter by the plangency of the soprano voice uttering them.
After wild renditions, played without pauses between them, of "Ich grolle . . .," "Und wüssten's . . ." and the raucous wedding song, "Da ist ein Flöten und Geigen" ("What a fluting and fiddling"), there was a slight pause after the desperate postlude of the third song before the hushed beginning of "Hör' ich das Liedchen klingen" ("When I hear the song"), almost promising relief from pain. The song sounded more heartbreaking than I have ever heard it, and its placement in the cycle made perfect sense as never before. After the singer had finished her part, she lowered her head to the side while the postlude expressed yet another, deeper facet of the grief-stricken lover's pain. There were many other splendidly illuminating moments. Here are only two more. The restrained, toneless passion of the voice in "Ich hab' im Traum geweinet" is echoed in the dry, percussive chords in the piano. That's to be expected. But the unexpected happened at the last statement of the theme, when formerly dry chords become legato and soulful. Taylor made these chords sound like a funeral march, so that in the voice's agonized wail of loneliness and abandonment — ". . . noch immer / Strömt meine Tränenflut" (". . . still my tears stream") — death was lurking. It was a revelation. And finally, the palpable beauty in the way Schäfer linked the words "meine Liebe" in the heartbreaking final two lines of the last song was reason enough to hear this artist sing the cycle. The four encores were no relaxation: Schumann's "Schneeglöckchen" ("Snowbells"); Webern's "Dies ist ein Lied fur dich allein" ("This is a song for thee alone"); and two by Schubert, "Nacht und Träume" ("Night and Dreams") — after a full program! — and the first of his settings of Goethe's "An den Mond" ("To the Moon"). (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.) ©2002 Stephanie Friedman, all rights reserved |
