Festival Music

Benjamin Appl

Queen's Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

OF the many measures of future success for young German baritone Benjamin Appl, the bouquets presented to himself and pianist Pavel Kolesnikov by fans in the audience at the end of Thursday morning's recital may turn out to be far from insignificant. Appl, who has already appeared in the capital as a soloist with Edinburgh Royal Choral Union, is a handsome chap and a music marketeer's dream.

One of the last pupils of the legendary Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, he does not yet have a voice of that scale, but it is very expressive across his entire range and there is something old-fashioned in his slight tendency to slide into some notes, from just off-pitch. That trick he kept for the classic songs of Schubert, Schumann and Grieg which made up the bulk of his recital, while the first performance of Canto 1, a piece by Matthias Pintscher, the BBC SSO's artist-in-association, was instead a showpiece for his command and control of bold intervals and tricky time signatures – and even the whispered threats in Octavio Paz's poetry, as Kolesnikov found harmonics on bass strings inside the Steinway.

The recital was a carefully-plotted journey through his range, with the dramatic arc of Nachtstuck a highlight of a selection of Schubert that showed him as comfortable with songs to a "little lute", setting Rochlitz, as about a malevolent sadistic dwarf (Matthaus von Collin). On either side of the Pintscher he was as persuasive with the narrative of Belshazzar as Schumann's way with Heine's love lyrics, and then utterly at home with the six songs of Edvard Grieg that build on the tradition of the German composers and prefigure 20th century writing for the stage.