Here is my Wednesday July 29 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Monday July 27, 2009, performance of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin by baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Christoph Eschenbach, the first of this week's three Schubert song cycles at the Martin Theatre at Ravinia. Wednesday brings Winterreise and Friday night the 31st holds Schwanengesang and the B-Flat Piano Sonata, the composer's last, D. 960.
Ravinia scores points with Goerne and Eschenbach performing Schubert's great song cycles
Program one: Die schöne Müllerin
BY ANDREW PATNER
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Lovers of the song recital as an art form have had much to lament in recent years. Despite the efforts of many great performers to serve as teachers and mentors in this genre, the number of solo vocal presentations continues to decline and their once-central place in cultural life becomes ever more marginal.
Score big points then for Ravinia in fighting this trend this week with a mini-marathon of the highest quality and one unique in the U.S. After successful engagements in Austria and in London, top-flight German lieder artists baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Christoph Eschenbach are making Highland Park their only North American venue for performances of all three of Schubert’s great song cycles.
Monday night in the Martin Theatre, the pair held the audience spellbound for 75 minutes as they narrated with words and music the wanderings of a young miller that lead him first to love, then obsession, then rejection and suicide. The 26 year old Schubert’s 1823 setting of these poems, Die schöne Müllerin (“The Lovely Miller Maid”), by his near-contemporary Wilhelm Müller were his first outing in the form of a program-length song cycle and his example led to other masterworks throughout Europe.
Goerne is a unique performer in his combination of deep knowledge and understanding of music and text with a personal style that is equal parts physical, psychological and metaphysical. While some traditionalists do not understand his interpretive choices, to this admirer of the East German-born and -raised singer they are missing the forest for the trees. With Goerne, it's not a question of how he makes an individual phrase or completes a verse ending. It's not even how he sings a particular song. For even in his mixed programs -- which can range from Schubert to Schoenberg -- it's the full presentation that he is involved with and that he involves his listeners in as well. Each cycle is a journey, and as this burly man loses himself in it so we are transported with him.
Schubert painted pictures with the piano parts to his songs as few others have and Eschenbach is one of a very small number of elite partners in the song repertoire who somehow breathe with the singer literally and artistically. As the relationship of Goerne's character to the brook that runs by the mill changes, so Eschenbach's recreation of that brook builds and diminishes. Each man has his own ideas, yet they somehow meet within the performance and make decisions that serve the score in the here and now.
One would not want to see Shakespeare presented by various actors who all played Hamlet the same way. Goerne had both Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as his teachers, singers whose interpretations are often described as "definitive." But Goerne learned a deeper lesson from these masters: Singing great music and poetry is about the encounter at a particular place and time between singer, score, text and audience. From this perspective, Goerne has no peer today. He and Eschenbach will offer Schubert's song-cycle masterwork Winterreise ("Winter Journey") on Wednesday night and the posthumous collection Schwanengesang ("Swan Song") on Friday. These are landmark programs of this or any year.
Goerne is a unique performer in his combination of deep knowledge and understanding of music and text with a personal style that is equal parts physical, psychological and metaphysical. While some traditionalists do not understand his interpretive choices, to this admirer of the East German-born and -raised singer they are missing the forest for the trees. With Goerne, it's not a question of how he makes an individual phrase or completes a verse ending. It's not even how he sings a particular song. For even in his mixed programs -- which can range from Schubert to Schoenberg -- it's the full presentation that he is involved with and that he involves his listeners in as well. Each cycle is a journey, and as this burly man loses himself in it so we are transported with him.
Schubert painted pictures with the piano parts to his songs as few others have and Eschenbach is one of a very small number of elite partners in the song repertoire who somehow breathe with the singer literally and artistically. As the relationship of Goerne's character to the brook that runs by the mill changes, so Eschenbach's recreation of that brook builds and diminishes. Each man has his own ideas, yet they somehow meet within the performance and make decisions that serve the score in the here and now.
One would not want to see Shakespeare presented by various actors who all played Hamlet the same way. Goerne had both Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as his teachers, singers whose interpretations are often described as "definitive." But Goerne learned a deeper lesson from these masters: Singing great music and poetry is about the encounter at a particular place and time between singer, score, text and audience. From this perspective, Goerne has no peer today. He and Eschenbach will offer Schubert's song-cycle masterwork Winterreise ("Winter Journey") on Wednesday night and the posthumous collection Schwanengesang ("Swan Song") on Friday. These are landmark programs of this or any year.
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