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Recital by Angelika Kirchschlager and Simon Keenlyside
Vienna, Monday 19 June 2006
A personal review by Ursula Turecek
Monday, the 19th June, the day of the recital, was a very hot one in Vinna but the auditorium of the Theater an der Wien was air-conditioned so it was rather cool inside. The theatre was quite full but apparently not sold out. Sadly the audience turned out to be rather impossible in the course of the evening, even worse than usual. It is a deplorable but usual fact in Vienna that a lot of quite loud coughing, sneezing and chatting goes on during performances (and we could consider ourselves lucky enough that no mobile phone was ringing on Monday) but that the audience applauded after each song that was considered especially successful was a new and very inconvenient trait. Especially as AK asked the audience after the very first (!) song to applaud only at the end of a whole part. Given the intensity of the singers’ performances I really would have preferred to have the songs and duets fade away in silence and enter into the next piece’s mood together with the singers.
The Theater an der Wien’s orchestra pit was covered to form the recital’s podium, with a Steinway in the middle that was completely open and a little table with a water carafe and two glasses and two chairs on the right side (where the artists entered and left). In the background there was a blue “stage-setting” reaching a little higher than the open piano that looked as if blue planks had been nailed together. The recital began a little late at 7.45 p.m. SK and Graham Johnson were wearing tails while AK looked a little like what we call “süßes Wiener Mädel” (sweet Viennese girl, a typical character in Arthur Schnitzler’s plays for example) in a colour- and rather playful summer-evening-dress.
Both artists interpreted a very intense evening, making music together even when it was the turn of only one of them – meanwhile the other one waited on his chair in complete silence, following the music in his or her particular way: AK sitting up, listening attentively and smiling at SK during large parts of the evening, SK completely absorbed in the music, sitting rather sunk down and retired into himself. Technically the whole evening had a very high quality (despite of some minor blemishes that I attribute to the heat – with the spotlights the artists must have had temperatures of about 40° C and more on stage – and that I do not want to comment or enumerate in particular), SK’s technique being on the whole superior to AK’s (in my opinion that is) – but she made up for this with her charming stage presence and with the fact that her performances were not in the least inferior to his in intensity. The only restriction I have to make concerns GJ who in my opinion was a really fantastic accompanist some years ago but who has become a little “immobile” lately (a fact that I noticed at SK’s Zurich recital for the first time when SK – again in my opinion – would have needed a little more support from the piano than he actually got). But I would not at all say that he was not good – it was just this little “extra” that made him so special some time ago that was missing.
The whole evening was livened up by short instances when both singers did not agree about whose turn it was to sing (before the first duet – “Er und Sie” – they had to find out how to stand, before the second song in the Wolf block AK had to convince SK that it was her turn and after “Vor dem Fenster” by Brahms AK had no idea that it was her turn now), they had a very charming way to arrange this among themselves with eyes and hands and without saying anything or too much – it reminded me a little of the way Pelleas and Melisande treated each other in the Berlin performance. SK’s “behaviour” was much better than during all the other recitals I’ve heard (with the exception of Graz 2000 and the first Winterreise in Vienna in 2004), although he seemed to be nervous he was fidgeting much less and during the duets he was standing completely still.
The songs
The evening began with a block of four Schubert songs. With the very first one – the very rarely performed “Lambertine” – full of longing and yearning and despair AK set the tone for the whole evening, followed by the simple but beautiful “Der liebliche Stern”. SK’s contributions to this block were two songs I’ve heard him sing very often already, “Die Einsiedelei” and “Der Wanderer an den Mond”, the first folksong-like and that’s exactly the way it was sung very beautifully, the wanderer in the second longing for a homeland very distinctly (especially in the phrase “doch bin ich nirgend, ach zuhaus”/”yet I’m not at home anywhere”) while the whole song was interpreted with all the simplicity it requires. Needless to say that SK’s German diction was once again impeccable throughout the whole evening.
This was followed by four duets by Robert Schumann and one by Peter Cornelius. I did not feel absolutely sure if I like the two voices together when I first heard them in the Salzburg recital in 2002, but this time I was completely convinced by the sound they produced. But it was the way they made music together in a very special way creating a veritably magical atmosphere again full of longing and beauty that turned these duets into gems, mainly “In der Nacht” by Schumann.
The last block before the interval consisted of ten songs from Hugo Wolf’s Mörike-collection among which SK’s “In der Frühe” was an absolute highlight (certainly the best performance I’ve heard of this song so far), I think I’ve never heard him sing this song better before. “An die Geliebte” and “Der Jäger” were really beautifully sung and very well interpreted (especially the end of “An die Geliebte” – the way he made the sound die away at “zum Himmel auf” was magical and what followed was exactly the “stars’ song of light” the text and Wolf’s music so impressively describe or in “Der Jäger” at the part when the sulking hunter really starts to miss his sweetheart at “doch eh der Donner nun verhallt”) but he has proved in other recitals that he can do even better than this regarding the whole “story” the songs tell (they really had a lot of wonderful moments but something was missing in between that had been there in other performances). The performance of “Der Knabe und das Immlein” turned the song into a precious miniature. Another highlight of the Wolf-block was “Bei einer Trauung” (“At a wedding”), a song where Mörike and Wolf make fun of the 19th century’s “arranged” weddings. SK had done this well in Vienna in 2002 but then I was a little disappointed because something of the quite scathing sarcasm had been missing (after all the song’s accompaniment is a funeral march !). This time the performance was perfect. He was standing there like in the backrow of a church, watching what was going on in front and commenting on what he saw, finding not only the adequate facial expression but also exactly the right tone of voice for each remark. AK’s contributions to this block were very intensive performances of “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” (the girl in this song was really suffering from her lover’s unfaithfulness), “Lebe wohl” (you could feel the heart break in it) and an absolutely charming “Begegnung” where she told the story of the two secret lovers’ meeting with an impish smile. This ended the evening’s first part and there was much applause already.
SK opened the recital’s second part and a block of songs from Goethe’s novel „Wilhelm Meister“ with a beautiful interpretation of Schumann’s "Ballade des Harfners" (this sounded on the whole like a hymn to singing, especially the part when the harper enters and sings his song and afterwards the part where he tells the king what his singing is like) which was followed by three Mignon-songs, also in Schumann’s version. AK brought the girl Mignon and all her suffering impressively to life (for me those three songs were the highlights among AK’s solo-contributions to the evening). But the climax of this block, maybe of the whole evening was Schubert’s duet version of “Nun wer die Sehnsucht kennt”. Schubert followed Goethe’s description exactly in his setting, the text before the poem in the novel says: “... [Wilhelm] lapsed into a dreamy longing and more or less concordant with his emotions was the song that, just at this hour, Mignon and the harper sang as an irregular duet with the most sincere expression” and all three artists seemed to have taken the clue for their performance from Goethe’s “most sincere expression”. The result was the most perfect interpretation of this Schubert/Goethe “collaboration” I’ve ever heard, sung and played not only with utmost beauty but also with an intensity that seemed to make the air bristle with emotion, all the more so because of the “pianissimo” despair the singers delivered. Following the intertwining and loosening of the voices you could feel all the pain and the tragedy of those two “doomed” characters from “Wilhelm Meister”. Two more Schubert-songs on texts by Goethe ended this block: “Ganymed” by SK. I had the impression that he “painted” this song with his voice, there were so many colours in it, and the second part from „hinauf strebt’s” was as ecstatic as is appropriate for text and music but on the whole I like the version he did in Salzburg in 2002 better, it was even more perfect in every detail. This was followed by a very sexy “Suleika II” by AK.
One last group of songs and duets, mostly by Johannes Brahms this time, formed the evening’s final part. SK performed a very differentiated “Ständchen”, contrasting the picture of the three hearty and healthy students who are serenading with the image of the girl’s soft and tender dreams very clearly with his voice only. AK joined him for a very beautiful and atmospheric interpretation of “Vor dem Fenster”, taking the girl’s part in this folksong while SK sang the words of her lover serenading her in front of her window. Like so often in this recital the glory of their interpretation was the simplicity with which they delivered words and music, just “serving the song” with their voices. After each of them had performed one more song (where in SK’s contribution – “Auf dem Kirchhofe” – the final brightening on the word “genesen/recovered” was particularly notable) they provided another climax with Peter Cornelius’s duet “Ich und du” (Me and you) creating a nearly sacred atmosphere – you had the impression that listening to these two voices singing this text to this music you could feel, experience the very nature of love, condensed into a simple song. The recital ended with two more duets by Brahms, both of them wonderful although completely different from each other: “Es rauschen die Wasser” full of the dreamy mood that had enchanted to audience in so many others of the evening’s items while the singers delivered a charming and highly amusing quarrel in “Der Jäger und sein Liebchen”. Afterwards they hugged each other very affectionately while the enthusiastic applause and cheering was for once appropriate.
Finally we were granted two encores: SK sang Schubert’s lovely "L'Incanto degli occhi" once more very beautifully and simply sat down when the applause afterwards would not stop, and finally AK dismissed the audience with a magical performance of Brahms’s „Wiegenlied“. She had to “persuade” SK with gestures to join her for the final applause, he would have let her take it all alone.
After this very special recital the night was still very warm and felt as if it had been woven of dreams, of all the magic that the three artists had created at the Theater an der Wien.
UT, June 2006