United Kingdom Berg, Ullmann, Korngold, and R. Strauss: Paula Sides (soprano), Sergey Rybin (piano). VOCES8 Centre, St Anne and St Agnes Church, London, 21.10.2026. (MB)
Selection from:
Berg – Seven Early Songs
Viktor Ullmann – Three Sonnets from the Portuguese, Op.29; ‘Berjoskele’, Op.53 No.1
Korngold – Three Songs, Op.22
R. Strauss – Four Last Songs
This excellent concert from the Wren Church of St Anne and Agnes, currently the VOCES8 Centre, offered a generous taste of a new album from Paula Sides and Sergey Rybin, Of Love and Transience, scheduled for release (download only) on 30 October. Centred around Vienna as crucible of modernity and, more broadly, German song from the first half of the 20th-century, it inevitably dealt with darkness, implicit and explicit, as well as more ambiguous and even lighter emotions, yet by the same token illuminated a dark and miserable London evening.
The recital opened with two of Berg’s Seven Early Songs – to be heard in their entirety on the recording – which registered with verbal, musical, and dramatic immediacy. If one understood German, one could have taken dictation (musical dictation too, for that matter); if not, one would have gleaned so much from these vividly expressive performances, that one might barely have needed do so. ‘Der Nachtigall’ and its companion – I failed to make a note and my memory is eluding me – were equally full of colour in vocal and piano shading, suggestive of a landscape already not so far from that of the later Berg, Lulu included. In brief, yet musically telling remarks, Rybin pointed to the Jugendstil quality and cross-pollination at work here. Under his fingers, one could certainly hear that motivically, all the more so in combination with the voice.
Viktor Ullmann’s setting of three Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets in translation by Rilke, was given whole. What fascinating songs these are, written in 1940 in Theresienstadt, no more morbid than the extraordinary Der Kaiser von Atlantis (in which Sides sang at the Linbury Theatre for English Touring Opera in 2012). The first song’s wandering, suspended, ultimately oblique turn away from Ullmann’s teacher Schoenberg’s atonality could be heard and, crucially, felt not only in itself but in tandem with the words. Splendidly big-boned playing from Rybin imparted an almost orchestral frame that yet was utterly pianistic. One likewise felt, almost irrespective of language, the lover’s frustration in the second, as well as the delight of a first kiss and its implications in the third, culminating in truly hochdramatisch performance that yet never forsook the world of Lieder. After that, we heard the sobering simplicity and hope of a Yiddish song, ‘Berjoskele’ (‘Little Birch’), Ullmann set in 1944 as one of his Three Yiddish Songs, Op.53. The song’s truthful witness was duly mirrored in a moving performance.
There followed one of Korngold’s Op.22 songs, ‘Welt ist stille eingeschlafen’, Rybin immediately capturing the composer’s harmonic world, Sides extending that on her entry with a vocal line whose echoes of Puccini were relished. Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs are a tough proposition on piano – the poor pianist! – but ‘September’ proved a fond farewell, alert to all aspects of its text and their alchemy. ‘Mit dir zu schweigen’ from the Korngold set was the encore: delivered as if one of Klimt’s women had stepped forward from a canvas and told us her true(r) story.
The evening as a whole combined the intimacy and conviviality of a house concert with artistic range that spanned concert hall and opera house. More please — with a hearty recommendation for the album to come.
Mark Berry