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The Guardian, 30 Mar 2022 |
Tim Ashley |
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Liederabend, London, 29.3.2022 |
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Kaufmann/Damrau and Deutsch review – deeply felt, rapturous performance
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Tenor Jonas Kaufmann’s dark and beautiful tone captured Schumann’s introspection and interlocked with soprano Diana Damrau’s wonderful vocal lines for a ravishing Brahms closer |
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The nature of love as explored in the songs and duets of Brahms and Schumann
was the subject of Jonas Kaufmann and Diana Damrau’s latest Barbican
concert, carefully programmed by pianist Helmut Deutsch, and forming an
effective sequel to their near-dramatised performances of Hugo Wolf’s
Italienisches Liederbuch in 2018. Less overtly histrionic than that earlier
concert, and consequently more reflective in tone, the new programme
nevertheless had much in common with it, with groups of songs by each
composer carefully fashioned into narratives of love, loss, desire and
affirmation, all of them sharply differentiated.
Unlike its
predecessor, however – which gave us, after all, a self-contained work –
this recital juxtaposed the little known with the familiar, and took
occasional liberties with the latter. Both composers’ duets are genuine
rarities and frequently fascinating. Schumann’s Tragödie, depicting a
catastrophic elopement that leaves its lovers defenceless in exile, is
marvellously structured with a song for each singer before the two voices
weave together in sad contemplation of past and future. Brahms’s Boten der
Liebe, which brought the concert to its close, is utterly ravishing with its
interlocking vocal lines conveying infinite affection and quiet contentment.
More equivocal, however, was Kaufmann and Damrau’s decision to fashion duets
from songs containing dialogue but originally intended for a single
performer, which brought home the bawdry, often overlooked, of Brahms’s
Vergebliches Ständchen, but dissipated the tensions of his extraordinary Von
ewiger Liebe.
For the most part, they sang superbly. Kaufmann was on
particularly fine form, his tone dark and beautiful, his dynamic control
exemplary as he marvellously captured the introspection of Schumann’s
unsettling Resignation and Brahms’s Waldeinsamkeit, and powered his way
through the steady crescendo of Stille Tränen from Schumann’s Kerner Lieder
with extraordinary intensity. Damrau took a few minutes to settle: there
were a couple of moments, early on, when her diction slipped
uncharacteristically. Later she gave us some wonderful things – shock as
well as sadness in the second song of Tragödie, and a deeply felt, rapturous
performance of Schumann’s Lied der Suleika. At over two hours, this was a
longish programme, and Deutsch, tireless and indefatigable, played with
great subtlety and dramatic restraint throughout.
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