Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch used the lockdown of 2020 to
make this recording devoted to Franz Liszt, a composer for whom
both feel an affinity and whose music has long featured in their
shared concert career. The Petrarch Sonnets have been in
Kaufmann’s repertory for many years, while Die Loreley, O lieb,
solang du lieben kannst and Es muss ein Wunderbares sein have
often provided encores. Others were new to him, as he says:
”I’m very pleased that our enforced rest made this album
possible – under normal circumstances it would probably not have
come into existence quite so quickly. As a result we were able
to record not only those Liszt songs that we had already tried
out in the concert hall but also a number of others that until
now have been overshadowed by Liszt’s ‘great hits’.”
Helmut Deutsch says in his intriguing booklet note that he has
long hero-worshipped Liszt (so it is not just me, then!) and for
whom “Liszt deserves to occupy a leading place in the history of
the art song.” If he is not quite there yet, such advocacy as we
hear on much of this CD will surely help.
The programme
is a good one, combining a good number of recital favourites
with a few less familiar items, and acknowledging Liszt’s habit
of revisiting a song with a new version of his setting, or
revisiting a poem with a largely new setting. Thus the title
poem, Freudvoll und leidvoll, is given in two ‘versions’ but the
second is practically a new setting, using a piano figure from
the first version to drive a swifter more dramatic account, a
minute shorter. Both are persuasively sung and played and each
is welcome.
At the close of the recital we are given
settings of both of Goethe’s Wanderers Nachtlied I and II. But
where Schubert retains Goethe’s title, Liszt uses the first line
of each poem as his title. The first Nachtlied thus becomes Der
du vom dem Himmel bist, and the first version has a climax with
much repetition of the last line “komm, ach, komm in meiner
Brust” marked com somma passione (‘with great passion’). A third
version from eighteen years later replaces all those passionate
repetitions with a simple quiet pathos. Again these are
different enough for both to be welcome and a fascinating
illustration of Liszt’s long engagement with the same text.
The centre piece of the recital are the Three Petrarch
Sonnets, also very passionate pieces with taxing vocal lines,
and Deutsch and Kaufmann are unapologetic in placing them in the
opera house rather than recital room, even at the expense of the
tenor making a couple of moments sound rather effortful. But
Liszt the songwriter is rarely concerned with the good musical
manners of the Lied tradition he admired so much in Schubert and
Schumann. The performers’ approach to these supreme love songs
is surely to be preferred to some pallid emasculation of such
high romantic ambition.
Kaufmann does not stint on the
volume in louder moments, although much of the recital is
focussed on quieter lyrics, including such famous numbers as Es
muss ein Wunderbares sein and O Lieb so lang du lieben kannst,
both well executed. One critic has referred to “crooning” in
Kaufmann’s singing of some pieces, another to a
“Helden-whisper”, but I hear rather the intimate mezza-voce,
with many of the nuances of weight and colour, required to put
this music across. His singing of Im Rhein, im schönen Strome is
just one case in point, a poetic evocation of Heine’s lyric and
Liszt’s musical treatment of it. In another famous song, Die
Loreley, at the end of the second stanza the word
Abendsonnenschein (‘evening sun’) shows immaculate control of a
tricky line.
Of course this is a song recital by an
operatic star, and some collectors will seek it out in that
spirit. They will not be disappointed. Those requiring a vocal
manner that remains firmly in the recital room or a domestic
setting will find many of these pieces on the volumes of the
ongoing complete edition of Liszt’s songs currently available
from Hyperion. But for a passionate, individual approach to a
fine programme, this too will hold a place in the growing Liszt
song catalogue.