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The Times |
Geoff Brown |
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Crying Wolf |
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As
a lieder composer, the depressive and adventurous Austrian
master HW has never won the audience's popular vote, which seems
permanently reserved for Schubert. That didn't stop the lustrous
Jonas Kaufmann and Diana Damrau spending last February with
their excellent accompanist Helmet Deutsch touring 12 European
cities with Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch - 46 compact songs,
ardent, coquettish, despairing, comic, on the bottomless topic
of love. Packed houses and rave reviews. And now this album
recorded live in Essen. In one respect, purchasers enjoy a big
advantage over those at the concerts: they can't see the
singers' fussy platform business (oops Liz!)..the shrugs and
heart beating, the flouncing and flirting. Kaufmann and Damrau
clearly engineering all that to help Wolf's anthology of
song (pointedly not a planned cycle) into a broadly convincing
series of intimate dramas, one song seemingly answering the
next. But we're much better off listening blind (oops again
Liz!). Damrau's bright and piercing soprano is particularly
telling, very effective when teasing and playing the coquette,
or digging out the smallest nuances in the texts of these
anonymous ditties, suavely translated into German. Just
occasionally she misjudges her effects, as in the comic Ich esse
nun mein Brot. The Essen audience laughs just the same.'
Kaufmann's singing doesn't penetrate the words to the same
degree, although that's not such a problem since most songs cast
him as the lovestruck male who thinks his lover more beautiful
than Siena and Orvieto's cathedrals. The tenor hits his peak in
another vein, in the song Sterb' ich, contemplating his flowery
grave in affecting bleached tones and long phrases sustained
with immaculate breath control. In all these songs we are aware
too of the third artist at this feast, the pianist Deutsch.
Whatever the songs' kaleidoscopic demands - brusque cries,
delicate embroidery, unsettled harmonic shifts, the comic
imitation of an appalling violinist - he is ever judicious,
perfect and precise: a pianist you could take anywhere. With
this crack team, you could almost do the same with Wolf .
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