While his opera work can be hit and miss, when it comes to Lieder Christian Gerhaher is lord of all he purveys. Now that the great baritone and his piano partner Gerold Huber have finished their Schumann survey and released the complete songs on CD, they are turning their attention to Brahms. It’s an obvious next step given the two composers’ musical and personal ties, and to judge by the selections they brought to London's Wigmore Hall this week the artists are relishing their new adventure.
A shame about the pre-interval gloom, but that’s Brahms for you. “The remorse that pounds in your heart”; “I wish to live no more”; “My heart is shaken by so much pain”; “Bitter recriminations”; “At loggerheads”… Each of those lines is from a different setting from Brahms’ Op.32. How true rang Meine Lieder that opened the second half: “Dark is the sound of my songs”! Gerhaher, though, was alive to every nuance in both text and score and shaded his palette so deftly that wrists remained happily unslit throughout those nine opening songs and beyond.
Huber embraced the songs’ lugubriousness without apology yet was never drawn into swooning misery. He ended the Op.32 set with a loving embrace of its diatonic simplicity before diving into the complexity of the Four Serious Songs, settings of liturgical texts composed 35 years later and every inch the work of a man looking death in the eye.
If part one was moribund, part two was more for the living, although even here there were exceptions. A florilegium of ecstatic Lieder nourished the talents of both musicians, be it Huber’s evocation of a gentle breeze at dusk in Geheimnis or the slumbering light of Gerhaher’s silvery moon in Die Mainacht, a song that sat beautifully in the baritone’s warm, flawlessly centred voice.
Subtle contrasts abounded throughout the well-chosen programme. The prolixity of Regenlied was followed by its opposite, a gaze into the eyes of a loved one (Dein blaues Auge) to a verse by Klaus Grath that weeps for unrequited love in the space of eight short lines. Treue Liebe, a sad tale of a lover in mourning, was over-romanticised by the piano’s watery dappling and by the poet Eduard Ferrand’s veiled hint at the point of suicide that a mermaid had reunited with her beloved; in musical terms the ethereal voices of skylarks in the next song, Lerchengesang, were infinitely more moving.
Once the pleasure of Gerhaher’s comforting persona and his instinctive convergence with Huber’s pianism had won over the Wigmore Hall audience – as they invariably do – it was easy to trust the musicianship and relax into the music. Gears changed imperceptibly as the pair moved from the Schubertian style of Wehe, so willst du mich wieder to the lush Romanticism of Du sprichst, daß ich mich täuschte and thence to the strange ecstasy of GF Daumer’s masochistic So stehn wir, all three dating from 1864 and all performed with unassailable levels of skill, love and artistry.
