Christian Gerhaher, Wigmore Hall, review: At last! A world-class recital with a proper audience
On Sunday night, the Wigmore Hall offered something tremendous, and heartening – a full-length recital from Christian Gerhaher, one of the world’s greatest singers of Romantic song. But unlike the Proms, which didn’t manage to squeeze even a few dozen listeners into the Albert Hall, the Wigmore allowed in 112 of its loyal subscribers, twice as many as originally promised. It felt like a real audience rather than a token one, and a big step towards normality.
As for the concert, it was (almost) beyond praise. Gerhaher had the ingenious idea of interweaving songs by Schubert and Alban Berg, two towering and interestingly contrasted figures of German Romanticism. The first comes from that movement’s bright springtime, the other from its dark, sad twilight, when the imagery of moonlit nights and dreams and lonely lovers has become neurotic, more redolent of Freud’s consulting couch than a walk in the countryside.
Gerhaher has always been associated with the former, because his voice and whole demeanour bespeak an open, frank nature. In the very first song, Schubert’s Abendbilder (Evening Pictures), it felt as if the gathering dusk and the fields dusted with evening dew were right in front of him, and he was musing on them more to himself than us.
Eventually, we seemed to hear the tolling church bell calling people to Vespers from miles away, brilliantly evoked by pianist Gerold Huber (who proved in this recital to be just as great an artist as Gerhaher). Then the poem moved from the fields themselves to the divinity within them, and Gerhaher summoned just a touch more radiance, without making too obvious a move to transcendence.
This was a reminder that Gerhaher never forces anything, which is what makes him such a companionable artist. Nevertheless he has a huge range of tone, and sometimes startled us with a sudden intensity of sound and feeling.
It was there in Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s great poem Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt (He Who Gives Himself over to Solitude), where the bitterness of self-willed isolation hit us right in the solar plexus. Intense though this was, one heard a new edge to Gerhaher’s voice, in the first of Berg’s Four Songs. He seemed to will himself down to dreamless oblivion, while Huber at the piano let forth a trickle of deliciously corrupt jazz-flavoured harmonies, as if Gershwin’s spirit had been relocated to a fin-de-siècle Viennese salon.
The only misstep in the recital was the inclusion of a piano arrangement of Berg’s orchestral Altenberg Lieder. Not even Huber’s amazing range of colours could disguise the fact that without their orchestral dress these songs lose all their magic.
That aside, it was one marvel after another. In the final song, Schubert’s Im Frühling (In the Spring) we returned to where we started: a blissful contemplation of Nature. Gerhaher and Huber gave the song a heartbreaking simplicity. It seemed just for a moment that returning to a state of innocence, at one with nature, is our surest route to happiness.
Stream this concert for free and donate to the Wigmore Hall at wigmore-hall.org.uk
