Love's loss lamented: Florian Boesch and Malcolm Martineau at Queen's Hall

Austrian baritone Florian Boesch and Scottish pianist Malcolm Martineau are frequent collaborators, here offering a traditional Lieder programme at the Edinburgh International Festival. The first half featured songs of Brahms and his friend and mentor Robert Schumann mostly concerned with love, celebrating its joys but more often lamenting its loss and its pains. 

The first Schumann group began with Die beiden Grenadiere (The two grenadiers), the composer’s fine setting of Heine’s touching poem on the contrasting reactions of two French soldiers to the defeat of Napoleon. Boesch and Martineau brought a sure command of its narrative arc, and exultation to its use of the Marsellaise. Next another long dramatic song based on Heine, Belsatzar (Belshazzar), offered the same qualities and ensured this pair of historical and biblical narrative Lieder acted almost like a ten-minute ‘overture’ successfully launching the recital.

Not all that followed reclaimed those heights, but enough did, not least the three Schumann “Harper” songs (Op.98, Nos 4, 6, and 8) that closed the first half, to ensure its warm reception from a Queen’s Hall audience familiar with Lieder recitals and this repertoire. A Brahms group came before that, a centrepiece that brought such favourites as Sonntag (Sunday), which Lieder authority Eric Sams called “one of the most perfect pages in Lieder history”. It sounded as much here in a charming account that brought out its Ländler affinities. Dein blaues Auge (Your blue eyes), another favourite, concerns the healing coolness that dampens fiery passion, Martineau’s skill in its prelude and postlude ideally framing Boesch’s sensitive vocal line.

The recital’s second half was devoted to Schumann’s best loved song cycle, Dichterliebe (A Poet's Love), Heine’s tale of love and loss echoing the themes of the first half. Boesch’s singing was always good, often much more than that, but occasionally limited in colour. In particular, while he has an admirable inclination to sing softly when required, the sap disappears from the tone at mezza-voce, and a certain thinness intrudes. But at mezzoforte and louder, he is solid in intonation, and with gradations of volume and intensity that always serve the text. 

Thus the first song of the cycle, Im wundershönen Monat Mai (In the lovely month of May), was nicely phrased but lacked that ecstatic sense of all nature celebrating a declaration of love that some voices can offer. But elsewhere most of the songs were fully achieved, and above all the cycle grew stronger as it proceeded. With Ich grolle nicht (I shall not chide) we heard a compelling piece of vocal control building to a fierce forte climax. There the lower note option was used instead of the (sometimes disputed) higher alternative, and it worked well for this interpretation, determined to endure heartbreak rather than crying out in despair. The final song Die alten bösen Lieder (The old bad songs) was splendidly sung too, and Martineau’s poised playing of the lyrical postlude set the seal on a satisfying Dichterliebe.