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the artsdesk, 17 February 2018
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by Alexandra Coghlan |
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Wolf: Italienisches Liederbuch, London, 16. Februar 2018 |
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Kaufmann, Damrau, Deutsch, Barbican review - bliss, if only you closed your eyes
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Schubert’s winter wanderer had Wilhelm Muller to voice his despair, while
Schumann’s poet-in-love had Heinrich Heine. The lovers of Hugo Wolf’s
Italienisches Liederbuch must make do with only the words of anonymous
Italian authors, albeit dressed up for the salon in elegant German
translations by Paul Heyse. The difference is telling, and for all Wolf’s
harmonic ingenuity, his cruel, clever wit and the giddy emotional range we
traverse in these 46 musical miniatures, they remain fragments – a
glittering, tessellated sequence that conceals little behind its shining
surface.
In some ways it’s not a fair fight. The Liederbuch is
precisely that: a songbook rather than a cycle. Each song (few lasting more
than two minutes) brings with it a new narrator, creating a bewildering
collage of characters and romantic scenarios. But the temptation has always
been to turn monologues into dialogues, to string the songs together into
dramatic encounters shared between a soprano and baritone – the male and
female speakers of the verses.
Here however we had a tenor and
soprano in Jonas Kaufmann and Diana Damrau – a pair of lovers whose
collective star-power rather pulled against the scrappy, brittle, youthful
quality of so many of the songs. Many musical paths can lead between
contemplative opener “Auch kleine Dinge”, tiny and glowing as the pearls it
describes, and the defiant sass of “Ich hab’ in Penna” that closes the set;
the singers chose one that took us from capricious, flirtatious youth,
through mature love and the suffering of separation and war, to mature
sexuality and desire.
Without a director’s hand to steady things, the
physical by-play of the framing sections was shamelessly overworked. Damrau
especially, whose female speakers tended often to the petulant,
ringlet-tossing end of the spectrum, grimaced and mimed gamely, underlining
comedy whose deft musical punchlines needed no help from her dramatic red
pen. Kaufmann – a straight man trying to play the clown – gave us broad
slapstick where we should have had irony, insinuation, rueful mischief.
But close your eyes and this was bliss. Damrau’s silver-spun tone crept
into the tiniest nooks of nuance and expression in these small songs, now
thickly veiled (“Mein Liebster singt am Haus”), now stiletto-sharp
(“Schweig’ einmal still”), now exquisitely vulgar (“Nein, junger Herr”), now
blanched into fragile purity (“Wir haben beide lange Zeit geschwiegen”). If
Kaufmann lacked the textural range of a Gerhaher, his tenor lovers had an
airy openness to them, and the whole performance had an ease to it we rarely
hear from him in the opera house, letting text not tone dominate. His
“Sterb’ ich, so hullt in Blumen meine Glieder” was a single exhalation of
the simplest, most devastating kind.
But the constant through all the
vicissitudes of love, the kissing and bickering, the breaking-up and
making-up, were Helmut Deutsch’s accompaniments. A magician couldn’t have
conjured a downier, softer musical feather-bed beneath the voices, nor
placed every narrative note of Wolf’s accompaniment with such instinctive
timing. Straight-faced through it all – understated as a Savile Row suit at
a fancy dress party – it was he who startled the only moment of true comedy
out of the evening. One of the finest song-pianists alive playing the role
of a truly, cripplingly, horrifyingly terrible violinist: now that’s a
punchline worth waiting for.
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