German baritone Roman Trekel, who made a rare London appearance replacing Dorothea Röschmann at the Wigmore Hall on Friday night, is a highly respected singer known especially for his many Wagner roles as well as for his Lieder interpretation. I first encountered him singing Wolfram in Tannhaüser at the Bayreuth Festival some years ago.
The recital was part of the Wigmore series “Decade by Decade – 100 years of German Song 1810-1910” devised by the pianist Malcolm Martineau, and he and Trekel explored the Lieder of the 1840s which included a well-known song-cycle by Robert Schumann as well as the lesser known ballads by Carl Loewe.
They began the recital with six songs by Felix Mendelssohn. There were some real gems here: Venetianisches Gondellied conjured up a romantic evening rendezvous in Venice, whereas Altdeutsches Frühlingslied, with its sparse piano accompaniment, depicted the loneliness after the loss of a loved one. Unlike Schumann, Mendelssohn doesn’t often wear his heart on sleeve, but Nachtlied, composed about a month before his death, is an emotional song and there was genuine feeling in Trekel’s performance.
From the 125 songs Schumann composed during the year 1840, Trekel and Martineau chose Liederkreis op. 24 for this programme. Comprised of nine songs set to Heine’s text, it loosely narrates a poet’s love, despair and his art. Both musicians knew the work inside out and performed with refreshing freedom and spontaneity (especially in the first two songs), although perhaps due to over-familiarity, there was some untidy piano playing in a few of the songs. In the central song Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden, Trekel’s dark-hued voice brought out the deep despair and what he lacked in the high notes he compensated with emotional commitment.