SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Schubert: Ian Bostridge, tenor, Julius Drake, piano, Kaul Auditorium, Reed College, Portland, Oregon, 24.1.2008 (BJ)


In the eight years since he recorded Sei mir gegrüßt with Julius Drake–it was part of their second CD of Schubert songs–Ian Bostridge has worked with several other eminent pianist, including Leif Ove Andsnes, Mitsuko Uchida, and Thomas Adès. But he has also continued his collaboration with Drake, and to hear them together again in this recital presented by Portland’s Friends of Chamber Music was to discover how much both have developed in that time.

Andsnes and Uchida are best known as soloists, and Adès as a composer. But as a partner in the field of Lieder, Drake yields nothing to any of them in poetic insight, ability to match his singer’s interpretation line for musical and textual line, technical virtuosity, and sheer pianistic allure. In this particular program of 20 Schubert songs, his quality was evidenced at once by the uncommonly gentle and meditative sound of his preludial bars in Im Frühling. At the opposite expressive extreme, he began Auf der Bruck with a wonderfully bracing muscularity, fully reciprocated by Bostridge when his turn came.

Yet it was in Sei mir Gegrüßt that singer and pianist alike scaled the highest peaks of eloquence. Here the inwardness of their performance, and the supernal delicacy of the echoed “sei mir geküßt” at the end of each of Rückert’s stanzas, stopped at least this listener’s heart, and when I listened to the already marvelous recording again a couple of days later, I realized that these musicians’ gifts in 2008 far outshine what they could offer in 2000. The gain is most striking, perhaps, in vocal terms. When he began to make his mark in the 1990s, Bostridge’s voice, while exquisitely nuanced, could still have been called relatively small.  In performances and recordings since then, I have observed his acquisition of a honeyed richness of tone that recalls the plush sound of a Tauber rather than the more contained sonority of a Wunderlich. And on this occasion, even in the face of some of Schubert’s biggest accompanimental effects, he was strong enough to surmount Drake’s far from unassertive playing with apparent ease.

Schubert is often described as a song composer focused mostly on musical values, in supposed contrast to Hugo Wolf’s verbal precision. But the choice of songs on this occasion, some of them relatively rarely programmed, served to underline how the earlier composer, whose melodic gift was unrivaled, could also out-Wolf Wolf in illuminating every facet of his texts. That opening Im Frühling was a case in point, by turns idyllic and wistful. Two Aus Heliopolis settings of Mayrhofer were full of raw strength, and the same poet’s Geheimnis, an Franz Schubert, which I cannot recall ever hearing before in live performance, was especially Wolfian in its conversational fluency.

The first half of the program ended with Totengräbers Heimweh, presented with chilling intensity. A more familiar highlight of the second half was a deliciously witty Die Forelle. And the vociferous ovation that saluted Bostridge and Drake at the end of the program was rewarded with two encores, in the shape of Heidenröslein, realized like the miniature masterpiece it is, and one of the An den Mond songs. It is sometimes suggested that the great age of Lieder-singing is past. Listen to such a masterly recital as this, and you realize what nonsense that is.

Bernard Jacobson


Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page