COMPOSERS: Mahler
LABELS: DG
ALBUM TITLE: Mahler - Lieder
WORKS: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
PERFORMER: Violeta Urmana, Anne Sofir von Otter, Thomas QuasthoffVienna Philharmonic OrchestraPierre Boulez
CATALOGUE NO: 477 5329
This looked particularly promising;
and, given the line-up, these
are inevitably performances
of considerably beauty and
accomplishment. Nevertheless,
by the end, I felt curiously shortchanged.
The performances, with the
exception of Thomas Quasthoff’s,
are too often disconcertingly
uninvolving, and lack real presence.
The playing is as clearly
articulated as one would expect
from this orchestra, in this venue
(home at the Musikverein), with
this conductor. But the soloists are
placed to the fore, and the orchestra
is strangely distant, both acoustically
and expressively. Quasthoff’s
is a heavy load of sorrow as the
Wayfaring Lad: his bass-baritone
weighs down every syllable, and the
fact that the song lies a little high
for him actually sharpens the blade’s
edge in the third song.
But both Violeta Urmana and
Anne Sofie von Otter are less
happily cast. The Rückert songs
really do need a mezzo-soprano and
Urmana, though radiant in the first
three songs, never really engages
in the last songs’ dark night of the
soul. Von Otter’s Kindertotenlieder
is poorly paced by Boulez: Mahler
emphasised how important the
relationship of one song is to
another here, yet they move with
a uniformly slow, grey pace. Von
Otter sings with a disappointingly
narrow palette of colour and
expression and, in the final storm,
substitutes an over-enunciated near-
Sprechgesang for true intensity.
No baritone has yet surpassed
the expressive span of Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau’s 1968 Gesellen
Lieder, with the wonderfully
sentient, plein-air accompaniment
of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra
under Rafael Kubelík. And
no mezzo has equalled Janet
Baker’s incomparably moving
Kindertotenlieder with Barbirolli
and the Hallé Orchestra, from
1967. I admire Dagmar Pe?ková’s
recordings of both these cycles, and
would consider her Rückert Lieder, with Ji?i B?lohlávek’s Prague
Chamber Philharmonic as a worthy
benchmark. Hilary Finch