Hanno Müller-Brachmann (bass-baritone) & András Schiff (piano)

Schubert: Willkommen und Abschied, Versunken, An Schwager Kronos, Meeres Stille, Prometheus

Mendelssohn: Variations sérieuses

Busoni: Fünf Goethe Lieder

Wolf: Drei Michelangelo Lieder

Brahms: Vier ernste Gesänge

Encores: Schubert Der Musensohn Brahms Wiegenlied

Wigmore Hall, London, 8 January 2009

The first half of the recital was devoted to settings of Goethe poems by Schubert and Busoni. András Schiff and Hanno Müller-Brachmann galloped recklessly to the meeting of the lovers in Willkomen und Abschied but lingered adeptly on the romance (Ganz war mein Herz an deiner Seite – “my heart was fully at your side”) of their nocturnal brief encounter. Yet more highly effective rushing along punctuated by pauses for thought came in An Schwager Kronos, Goethe’s recognition of the imperative to live life fast and furious as we hurtle towards eternity.

Outstanding in the Schubert group were the sparsely instrumented Meeres Stille and the defiant Prometheus. The sailor becalmed on a glassy sea is not in a mentally tranquil place – the isolation is “fearful deadly silence!” (Todesstille fürchterlich!) and Mülller-Brachmann skilfully controlled volume and expression to take us convincingly into this discomforting marine predicament. Prometheus’s indignation with the petty power play of the Gods was expressed with utter unfearing scorn by Müller-Brachmann (Ich kenne nichts Ärmeres unter der Sonn’, als euch, Gotter! – I know nothing more paltry beneath the sun than you, gods!) and his expression of the gods’ total lack of compassion was poignant (Hast du die Tränen gestillet je des Geängsteten? – Did you ever dry my tears when I was terrified?) Today’s Earthly powers, let alone deities, should have felt cause to tremble at the strength of his condemnation.

András Schiff played Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses between the Schubert and Busoni Goethe settings – the recital was part of a series he has devised called “Songs – With and Without Words”. It also provided a bridge to the second half of the concert: “seriousness” – being picked up again in Wolf’s Michelangelo Lieder and of course in Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge. The Variations’ seriousness is of a quasi-religious character drawing on a Bach-like theme with 17 variations in 10 minutes and thus looking forward to Brahms’s biblical settings.

Before the Wolf and Brahms, though, the first half ended with more Goethe. Busoni’s Fünf Goethelieder are sprightly, muscular settings that gave scope for Müller-Brachmann’s measured use of his operatic skills. None of these – two of the five drawn from Goethe’s Faust and two from the West-Östlicher Divan – was essayed by Schubert but there are settings of the Lied des Mephistopheles (about the king and his pampered pet flea) by Beethoven and Wagner as well as Mussorgsky, and of the Lied des Brander (“Once in a cellar there lived a rat”) by Wagner. Busoni’s settings of the two Faust songs sound as if they really could have been sung in a louche cellar drinking den in Leipzig, as they were in Goethe’s play, and Brecht and Eisler might have been sitting in a corner listening in – some things don’t change. Müller-Brachmann did them full justice. The West-Östlicher songs, Lied des Unmuts and Schlechter Trost are more serious thoughts – critiques of socal behaviour and expressions of self-doubt. The fifth setting, Zigeunerlied, is Goethe’s faux-scary satire on Gothic horror. Schiff revelled in Busoni’s wild-woods piano setting and Müller-Brachmann beautifully caught the onomatopoeic owl screech.

In the second half of the recital we reached the uncompromisingly serious part of the bass-baritone repertoire: the works that Matthias Goerne has made his speciality (late last year his most recent London recital included superb performances of both Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge and the Wolf Michelangelo Lieder). So Müller-Brachmann had high standards to live up to.

The two works were composed within a few months of each other in 1896-97. Brahms wrote against the background of the catastrophic stroke suffered by Clara Schumann from which she died two weeks after he completed the songs, his last vocal composition, and he was already suffering from the cancer that would shortly kill him; Wolf was on the brink of the profound mental instability that would make the Michelangelo settings his last works.

Wolf’s Wohl denk’ ich oft resolves from gloomy recollection into a celebration of the empowering nature of others’ love. Müller-Brachmann beautifully articulated the resounding celebration of the last line: Und, dass ich da bin, wissen alle Leute! (and the entire world knows that I exist!)

Alles endet, was enstehet offers no such consolation. We seem to have entered a very grim, flowerless graveyard – and one that Müller-Brachmann and Schiff fully explored. Wolf said he literally feared the composition’s effects on his own sanity – and that of his audience. “Such perilous things I am now producing to the public danger,” he noted.

Fühlt meine Seele, the last song Wolf completed, moves on from the bitter to the bitter-sweet. The protagonist ponders his feelings of elation mixed with pain. Is the object of his passion even attainable? We are properly left in doubt but Müller-Brachmann left us in no doubt in the final phrase of the intensity of that passion fulfilled or unfulfilled (Darin sind, Herrin, deine Augen Schuld! – Your eyes, my lady, are the cause) .

Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge.were first performed with the composer at the piano on 25 May 1897 at a private festival on the Rhine – the day after Clara Schumann’s funeral in Bonn. It must have been a poignant occasion as the cycle moved through verses from Ecclesiastes. Their positioning by Brahms (not in the order in which they appear in the Old Testament) throughout the songs is crucial; we move from the bleak statement that we are dust and return to dust, to the oppression that faces those who live, to the bitterness of death for those who still enjoy life but a resignation to its easing for those for whom life has become a burden. The final song asks what then does life offer – what is important in it? “Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe.... aber die Liebe ist die grösseste unter ihnen”. Müller-Brachmann and Schiff made the point powerfully – it is as relevant in 2009 as it was in 1897.

Müller-Brachmann told us we needed some relief from all this “seriousness” – we probably didn’t. But it was Liebe in the broadest sense, not “charity” but the one that Brahms had in mind, that had him sending us out into the cold street with a spirited Musensohn and a calming Wiegenlied ringing in our ears.

Roger Thomas

Other opinions were mixed; see Music Web's and OMH. PGW