United Kingdom Oxford Lieder Festival 2022 [6] – R. Schumann, Elena Langer, Johanna Kinkel: Anna Dennis and Caroline Taylor (sopranos), Hugh Cutting (countertenor), James Atkinson (baritone), Sir Thomas Allen (narrator), Nicholas Daniel (oboe), Roman Mints (violin), Emmanuella Reiter (viola), Kristina Blaumane (cello), Richard Gowers (harpsichord), George Ireland, Sholto Kynoch (piano). Holywell Music Room, Oxford 21.10.2022. (CR)
Johanna Kinkel – Nachtlied, Op.7 No.1; Wunsch, Op.7 No.2; The Lorelei, Op.7 No.4; Die nah’st!, Op.15 No.2; Stormy Wandering, Op.18 No.6
R. Schumann – Dichterliebe, Op.48
Elena Langer Landscape with Three People
Interspersed with readings from Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger
The principal part of this programme was devised by Steven Walter, and first presented at the Beethovenfest, Bonn. It cleverly interspersed Schumann’s great cycle Dichterliebe with five readings extracted from Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, such that each discrete sequence of songs aptly paralleled the episode from the novella with which it was juxtaposed. Despite the breaks, the songs were given in the order Robert Schumann intended so that the narrative trajectory which he forged in them from the various verses taken from the poetry of Heinrich Heine remained intact.
Schumann’s cycle received an intense performance from James Atkinson, and Sholto Kynoch at the piano, complementing the lively, dramatic thrust of Sir Thomas Allen’s readings of Mann, capturing both the authorial voice of irony in the novella and compassion for traumatic development of the sensitive title character as an artist and human being. Likewise, Atkinson didn’t just narrate the story of a love lost and won in Dichterliebe as an onlooker, as some accounts do, but as though working through a still-painful personal memory. Rather than a foursquare lyricism throughout, Atkinson often enunciated the poet’s words with immediate vividness, though still retaining full musical integrity and sense in each song. There was excitability and alacrity in the opening songs, giving way to a compelling gentleness or inwardness in those songs expressing, respectively, tenderness or sorrow, and at other times a hushed, hesitant disbelief or shock at the poet’s betrayed love. Telling, too, was his vociferous way with ‘Ich grolle nicht’, giving the lie to his not bearing a grudge of which the song speaks, and in the ironic comedy of ‘Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen’ (‘A boy loves a girl’) underlining its frustrated moral that such betrayed love ‘is an old story yet remains ever new’ – here, not merely a second-hand lesson, but hard-won experience.
Kynoch’s demonstrative accompaniment was fully involved with the narrative also, not merely illustrative, for example in the emphatic cadence at the end of the third song, after having left the concluding chords of the previous two hanging in suspense, so as to draw these three together in a compelling arc. The grief of the cycle’s later section was amply presaged in the solemn octave bass line of ‘Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome’, presumably mimicking an organ to signify the vast cathedral of Cologne that is referred to in the song, as well as harking to the penultimate movement of the composer’s ‘Rhenish’ Symphony No.3 which conjures exactly the same scene, whilst the piano’s little punctuating phrases in ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’ commented with grim irony upon the poet’s sorrow.
Also interspersed among sequences from Schumann and Mann were the eight songs of Elena Langer’s Landscape with Three People, setting words by Lee Harwood. They treated the same subject of jealousy and heartbreak within a love triangle, but in a modern, ambient musical style – with the accompaniment of oboe, strings, and harpsichord – rather than in the developmental manner of Schumann. Hugh Cutting and Anna Dennis gave as incisively involving accounts as Atkinson of Dichterliebe, not least with Cutting’s penetrating countertenor voice both powerful and ethereal, getting to the point of the terse poetry.
As part of the Oxford Lieder Festival’s emerging artists programme, the first section of the concert featured a handful of songs by Johanna Kinkel, a composer born in Bonn in 1810. Caroline Taylor, and George Ireland at the piano, gelled cogently in these attractively lyrical settings, which had something of Mendelssohn’s melodic fluency to them, giving them a worthwhile outing.
Curtis Rogers