Recently in Performances

ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude

English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.

Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco

This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).

Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall

Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.

Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London

Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.

A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn

Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.

The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place

For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.

Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House

'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’

Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020

‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’

Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert

There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.

‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London

‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields 're-connect'

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.

Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's

The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.

Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London

With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.

Royal Opera House Gala Concert

Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.

Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London

"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."

Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo

The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.

Precipice: The Grange Festival

Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.

Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London

There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”

Music for a While: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online

“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”

A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera

The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.

OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »

Performances

Matthias Goerne [Photo by Marco Borggreve for harmonia mundi]
26 Apr 2012

Matthias Goerne, Los Angeles

Los Angeles lieder lovers were treated to two extraordinary Schubertian journeys on April 16th and 18th when bass-baritone Matthias Goerne partnered with Christian Eschenbach performed the song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s celebration of the composer’s 215th birthday.

Sublime Schubert

Matthias Goerne, baritone; Christian Eschenbach, piano. Walt Disney Concert Hall. Franz Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin April 16, 2012. Franz Schubert: Winterreise April 18, 2012.

Above: Matthias Goerne [Photo by Marco Borggreve for harmonia mundi]

 

But then any performance by Goerne is sure to be extraordinary. The German singer has taken every aspect of the performance of lieder far beyond what it was when lieder recordings of an earlier generation of singers; Gerhard Husch, Friedrich Schorr, Lotte Lehman, became available to international audiences. His physical and vocal presentations have offered fresh insights and set new standards for the two generations of lieder aficionados nurtured by the voluminous recordings (at least twelve of Winterreise alone) and world-wide performances of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Goerne was in fact, considered Fischer-Dieskau’s anointed heir. Not only had he studied with him, as well as with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, but Fischer-Dieskau had recommended his young student as a replacement for himself when he retired in 1993. Goerne, however, considers the most important teacher in his life to have been Hans-Joachim Beyer, an assistant at the Mendelssohn Hochschule in Communist East Germany (he is cited on the singer’s web page) with whom he studied for two years. For an hour and a half a day, according to Goerne, ‘‘we only did exercises, no singing. Lots of la-la-la-la, ne-ne-ne-ne.’’

I first heard Goerne sing Winterreise at his Carnegie Hall debut in 1999 and was mesmerized by the intensity of his singing, a kind of innigkeit that few singers could achieve. He had burst on to the international musical scene several years earlier, much heralded for his youth, and for the warmth of a dark voice capable of floating the most tender pianissimo phrases. He was thirty-two in 1999, and accompanied by sixty-eight year old Alfred Brendel, long associated with Fischer-Dieskau and now drawn back to the world of lieder by Goerne’s voice and talent. Goerne was clearly nervous. He was dressed unconventionally, repeatedly moved his body, touched his hand to his nose obsessively, and his early pianissimi were not always audible. Yet he seemed in a world of his own into which his flexible voice drew a willing audience. Clearly, since then he has made journeys of his own. Though his appearance and his (what to some seem excessive) movements remain essentially unchanged, his voice has filled out and darkened, as has his view of both Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin. In the intervening years he has performed and recorded an extensive German repertoire with many pianists, but in Christian Eschenbach, with whom he is currently recording Schubert songs for Harmonia Mundi, he seems to have found a musician intimately attuned to his own view of these works.

Both song cycles are based on poems by Wilhelm Müller, almost exactly Schubert’s contemporary. Both tell the story of young men, who having loved and lost, are driven to darkest despair, and both reflect the highly romantic age in which they were created. Romantic, not only because they speak of love - but of unattainable, unrequited love (opera lovers, think Werther) - and because the romantic era was characterized by a new awareness and intimacy with nature. In Müller’s poetry every reference to a tree, a flower, a cloud, a drop of water, every adjective describing a tree, a flower, a dog, a bird, assumes a far deeper meaning. When Schubert added his lyrical gifts and musical onomatopoeia to this fevered mix, he created a medium in which every syllable of every sung word – every note on the piano, is not merely itself, but may foretell, recall, reflect on any shade of human destiny. Die schöne Müllerin consists of twenty songs, Winterreise of twenty-four, sung without interruption. To construct the cycle, each song, with its own story, its own mood, in its own key and rhythm, must fit in its place as neatly and properly as a stone in an arch. The highly compressed world of lieder is an art form that sorely tests singers and their pianists.

Though Die schöne Müllerin is a tale of lost love, it begins brightly with the sound of the rushing brook and turning of the wheels that propel the mill. (Ah, Schubert’s exquisite ability to portray sunshine on streams) Generations of singers have performed the cycle in a way that is sympathetic to the doomed youth. Early on Goerne viewed the protagonist as an emotionally disturbed man. His depiction of the rejected youth has darkened to the point where he considers him as madly self-centered, paranoid to the point of blaming everyone else for his troubles. “Mein”, generally treated as a joyous discovery of love, begins with the voice of the murmuring brook in the piano. Entering the scene, the boy tells the brook to stop its murmuring so that he can fill the world with his discovery that the müllerin loves him. However, Christian Eschenbach’s brook didn’t murmur, it thundered. And Matthias Goerne didn’t entreat it to silence, he commanded it. And for the repeated words “mein, mein, mein”, usually heard as a bright joyous syllable, Goerne reached into the depth of his voice for a “mein” that sounded almost villainous.

“Des Baches Wiegenlied” (“The Brook’s Lullaby”) the last song of the cycle completes the romantic cycle – the boy who has yearned for love, found it and lost it, now drowns himself in the brook. Goerne and Eschenbach performed this piece at an extremely slow pace. Astonishingly, as overtones hovered almost interminably between phrases and their resolution, neither singer nor pianist lost the melodic and harmonic threads of the piece. At its conclusion, Christian Eschenbach’s hands remained on the keyboard and Matthias Goerne, bent low, with his head almost in the body of the piano, commanded the audience to silence.

Eventually it erupted into applause.

The two artists looked exhausted.

The protagonist of Winterreise has already lost the girl when we meet him. He is traveling he knows not where, through the natural world at its most fearsome; in the winter - with snow, ice, blowing clouds, fierce winds. He is followed by a crow, dogs bark at him, his tears freeze, the brook freezes over. Though the overall mood of the cycle varies little, Schubert makes use of folk tunes throughout Winterreise, and an endless variety of subtleties are depicted in text and music: rhythmic and harmonic patterns describe tear drops, footsteps, hoof beats, rays of light, threatening clouds. There are few recollections in Winterreise. It is about the present. A man is telling us of the aimless day-to- day bleakness of his life. To sing for an hour and a half about despair in all its various shades and shapes, requires the highest degree of that innigkeit and intensity of which Goerne is a master. He and Eschenbach seemed as one in the coloring, pacing, and tempi of Winterreise. This was the angriest Winterreise I ever heard, yet it was sung as though fury was the only reaction available to the lost soul on the stage. “You have a voice that speaks to people....a way of focusing a listener’s attention,” Fischer-Dieskau is said to have told him.

“Der Leierman”, (“The Organ Grinder”), the touching concluding song is enigmatic. It depicts an impoverished old man, ignored by people, pursued by dogs, wandering barefoot through snow, constantly playing his tunes in the hope of a few cents. Does our unhappy young man follow him? And of so, into what? The constancy of hope and life? Or to certain death? We cannot know. We are left to make our own conclusion.

For the effect that Matthias Goerne’s voice has on the listener, I hope that readers of this review, particularly those not acquainted with German lieder, repeat a little experiment I just tried. Search “Der Leiermann” on “You tube” and listen to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Ian Bostridge, Peter Schreier, the superb Thomas Quasthoff, and any other great voice that you can find, then listen to Matthias Goerne. Beyond the question of interpretation, I think you will find a certain (without intending to be off-hand about it, I have to say) je ne sais pas in his voice. A depth? A gravelly quality? A slight vibrato? Whatever it is, I think it will find an echo in your own heart.

And what about Herr Goerne’s own journey as a singer? “Time and patience are the most important things,’’ he has said. ‘‘In every phase, whether you’re 21 or 31, you need to feel that this moment is the ne plus ultra. You can’t tell yourself that in five years you’ll do a piece differently or better. But five years later, you look back and you can see that you’re in a new place. It’s a sign that you’ve been working hard.’’

Estelle Gilson

Send to a friend

Send a link to this article to a friend with an optional message.

Friend's Email Address: (required)

Your Email Address: (required)

Message (optional):