In
the depths of winter, who isn’t longing for a summer holiday,
and – even better – a holiday romance? So the timing is right
for this recording of Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook, not a true
song-cycle but a collection of vignettes, his story and her
story, capturing the foibles of love, courtship, jealousy, pain
and parting (the texts are translated into German from anonymous
Italian poets). We don’t have two real characters here but we
have three voices: a man’s, a woman’s and a piano. If he and she
can’t seem to agree on much, usually the piano gets the last
word.
Recorded live towards the end of their tour
performing these 46 miniatures, Jonas Kaufmann and Diana Damrau
give the piece something of a glossy reboot, and it’s a useful
one, for a serious, single-composer Liederabend is no longer an
automatic box-office draw, even in Germany and Austria. Each is
probably the foremost German singer of their voice type in the
world today, and both have excelled in Italian repertoire, so
who better to take Wolf’s journey south of the Alps?
The
‘Diana and Jonas show’ was, by all accounts, really something of
a show. Supported by the pianist Helmut Deutsch, who reorganised
the songs into a very loose emotional narrative, the two also
play-acted for the audience. This survives on record only as the
sound of occasional audience chortling, which is jarring when
often what’s been sung is actually verging on the tragic or
bitter. Such is the ambiguity of these fascinating songs, which
play with the lyricism of Italian opera and balladry while at
the same time disdaining it.
Of the two singers, the
bright-voiced Damrau is the more nuanced and precise with text,
even if Wolf mostly allocates his female singer the role of the
coquette or minx. Still, she digs deep. ‘Ich bin verliebt, doch
eben nicht in dich’ – ‘I’m in love, but not with you’ – is
poignantly and cleverly delivered in ‘Du denkst mit einem
Fädchen mich zu fangen’. And she finds a palpably erotic frisson
behind ‘Wie lange schon war immer mein Verlangen’, a plea for a
musician (any musician?) to come and woo her.
Kaufmann,
husky and intense, has less in his Lieder toolkit but he is
completely committed to the material. You may surrender to his
breathy-verging-on-crooning pianissimo singing or detest it –
it’s not deployed too often here to grate. In a central section
where the themes grow more morbid, he really excels as the
writing grows more Wagnerian: ‘Und willst du deinen Liebsten
sterben sehen’ unfolds in an almost Tristan-esque haze, directly
followed by the rich melancholy of ‘Sterb’ ich, so hüllt in
Blumen meine Glieder’.
While Kaufmann and Damrau are
clearly at ease with each other and the chemistry really works,
there are no duets here. The expressive glue is in fact Deutsch,
with his unsentimental probing of Wolf’s ruthlessly concise
writing and often devastating delivery of those fascinating,
heart-stopping cadences.
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