CHRISTIAN Gerhaher is one of the finest baritones of his generation, with powers of interpretation that set him in a league apart.
That needs to be said at the top, because on Saturday morning, giving the opening concert in the festival's Queen's Hall series of recitals, he was not in his usual immaculately sustained voice.
He had a cold, we were told, but would soldier ahead. The voice was a bit rough-edged at points in his all-Schumann programme. And that's simply a matter of fact. In a perverse way, however, it seemed only to highlight the Munich man's remarkable abilities with a text.
He consistently focused on the texts of Schumann's opus 107 songs and the heartstopping cycle, Dichterliebe, principally through flawless and pristine enunciation, but also through his wonderful ability to generate that special intimacy with the listener, who feels that Gerhaher is singing just to you.
Gerold Huber, Gerhaher's regular accompanist, is a fine and poetic pianist, but he is also idiosyncratic. He almost had his own wee act going with his somewhat theatrical mobility at the keyboard, hands flying up in the air. ("Sit still", I wanted to shout.) Very distracting; but not half as distracting as his habit of mouthing the words of the songs as Gerhaher sang them.
Finally; was it wise to programme the tremendous Wilhelm Meister and other songs in the second half, following a first half that had climaxed with Dichterliebe? Dichterliebe is unfollowable. After the interval we needed a different landscape, a change of mood, different colours and a different sound world, not more Schumann.
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