Bumpy love songs from Roderick Williams and Julius Drake at PCMS

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Julius Drake devised a program for Philadelphia Chamber Music Society that revolved around the theme of eternal love. At its center was Die schӧne Magelone, the rarely performed Brahms song cycle that integrates poetry and music in telling its heroic, romantic story. Brahms alternated his 15 songs with recitations from the source text, a late 18th-century novel by Ludwig Tieck. The structure provides a challenge for the artist – some omit the spoken sections altogether – but Williams and Drake teamed with local storyteller Charlotte Blake Alston to perform the poetic interludes leading into the music. Visual artist Cristina Garcia Martin also provided an illustrated account of the knight Peter’s passion for the fair Magelone, which was projected above the stage of the Perelman Theater.

The total project unfortunately represented a case of more as less. The visual component felt extraneous and distracting, with Garcia Martin’s self-consciously crude renderings seeming more childish than passionate. In English translations done by Williams himself, the poems came across as bland and cerebral – they obstructed rather than furthered the progress of the storytelling. Blake Alston’s prosaic delivery further hampered the proceedings: seated in an armchair and rarely looking up from her script, her recitations lacked vocal variation, continually zapping the energy built by the musical sections.

Williams fared best in the cycle’s up-tempo songs, communicating Peter’s youthful energy in Keinen hat es noch gereut, his deep longing for Magelone in Wie soll ich die Freude?, and his growing discontent with faith in Verzweiflung. Throughout the performance, though, his interpretation lacked much distinctive coloring or strong attention to detail in the words. Legato phrasing largely eluded him in slower numbers like Ruhe, Süssliebchen, Muss es eine Trennung geben? and Treue Liebe dauert lange. Drake played to his customary high standard, although much of the music’s strophic nature grew repetitive to the ear as the performance progressed. Peter’s trials and tribulations felt somewhat quotidian here, and his ultimate happy ending with Magelone didn’t swell with romantic feeling as it should.

The evening began with perhaps the song literature’s greatest love story: Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. The now-weathered quality of Williams’ lyric baritone suited the often anguished character of this music better, although true legato again remained elusive. Drake showed his own prowess in the postludes used by Beethoven to seamlessly stitch the six songs together. Unlike the more equivocal Brahms, the music here was its own reward.