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Recital
16 June 2008
Wigmore Hall, London
Gerald Finley
Julius Drake
Lunchtime concert broadcast live by BBC Radio 3 and repeated on Saturday 21 June 2008
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/lunchtimeconcerts/pip/uc87j/
Robert Schumann:
Tragödie I-III, Op.64/3
Der arme Peter, Op.53/3
Lehn’ deine Wang, Op.142/2
Es leuchtet meine Liebe, Op.127/3
Dein Angesicht, Op.127/2
Mein Wagen rollet langsam, Op.142/4
Belsazar, Op.57
Three Songs from Myrthen, Op.25
Edvard Grieg: Five Songs from Op.48
Gruss Dereinst
Gedanke mein
Lauf der Welt
Zur Rosenzeit
Ein Traum
Robert Schumann:
Die fiendlichen Brüder, Op.49/2
Abends am Strand, Op.45/3
Die beiden Grenadiere, Op.49/1
Encore
Charles Ives:
Ich grolle nicht
What the critics say
Ben Hogwood, classicalsource.com, 16 June 2008
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=5982
The poetry of Heinrich Heine was the theme of this attractive BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime concert, the poet’s tendency to "express the impossibility of physical union" fitting hand-in-glove with the music and life of Robert Schumann.
Schumann’s Heine settings have yielded some glorious music, sung here with incredible sensitivity by Gerald Finley with Julius Drake's extremely responsive accompanist. They began with the persuasive overtones of “Tragödie”, turning sour in the night frost as the second verse began. This fate also befell “Der arme Peter”, which experienced a sharp downturn from happiness to heaviness.
Not all the songs were so inclined, however, and in the first group was the surging lines of “Lehn’ deine Wang”, the serenity of “Dein Angesicht”, where a pure stillness was evident in Drake’s accompaniment, and the descriptive “Mein Wagen Rollet Langsam”, whose lightly stuttering rhythms were a delight.
The second group of songs took Grieg’s briefly flourishing setting of Heine’s “Gruss”, placing it in context with four others from the Opus 48 set of the mid-1880s. Finley used a fuller tone for Goethe’s “Zur Rosenzeit”, with a real anguish in the closing bars, while “Ein Traum”, specifically composed as an extended crescendo, grew as such having begun with a close intimacy. The clarity of Finley’s powerful fortissimo was extremely impressive.
Accompanying the Grieg songs were three from Schumann's “Myrthen” cycle. ‘Lotosblume’ given a tender performance. Here it was noticeable that at times Finley would sing ever so slightly flat, aiding the expressive delivery of lines such as "Du bist wie eine Blume" (You are like a flower) in the song of the same name.
For the third group we had more Schumann, and a dramatic “Belsazar” that fair leapt off the page, as did the human-hand writing on the wall towards the end of the song. Two militaristic songs had a sting in the tale, and sandwiched the blissful “Abends am Strand”, which also toiled in its central section. But when Finley reached the musical quote from "La Marseillaise" with which “Die beiden Grenadiere” ends, his was a big, brash declaration, and the way in which this subsided was strangely moving.
Finley and Drake will release all of this repertoire together with “Dichterliebe” on Hyperion in the autumn, but for their encore they found an unexpected treat from a previous Hyperion disc of Charles Ives, his sublime setting of "Ich grolle nicht".
Hilary Finch, Times, 20 June 2008
Rating: Four out of five stars
Tony Harrison once wrote a memorable film-poem for BBC television called The Gaze of the Gorgon that focused on a statue of Heinrich Heine clutching the manuscript of his poem Was will die einsame Tränen?, set to music by Schumann. The relationship between poet and composer has been a resonant source of inspiration for generations of poets, musicians and film-makers; and that very song was at the heart of a Schumann/Heine lunchtime recital given by Gerald Finley and Julius Drake.
The fascination of Schumann’s settings of Heine lies in their ever-shifting tones of voice: sometimes making the poet’s irony bite deeper, sometimes blissfully ignoring it, and often playing with its ambiguities as only music can. Finley and Drake revelled in it all.
Finley’s easeful and unselfconscious baritone swept onstage with the excited momentum of elopement in Tragödie, only to bring numb chill to the lovers’ death. Then came three songs about poor Peter — Der arme Peter — a timid creature whose tragicomic unrequited love inspired both Finley and Drake to a dark and desperate drollery.
The sheer spookiness of Mein Wagen rollet langsam, a cameo of a musing lover who catches sight of three shadowy figures peering into his carriage window, is usually exploited in performance. But Finley made a whimsical daydream of it, with Drake contributing a balmy, fanciful piano postlude. The menace was reserved for the writing on the wall. In a splendidly paced performance of Schumann’s long ballad Belsazar, Finley brought a terrifying sense of drunken hubris to the roistering king of Babylon.
Schumann framed five German settings by Grieg, before Finley paid a touching tribute to his native New World in a still little-known setting of Heine’s Ich grolle nicht by none other than Charles Ives.