Angelika Kirchschlager has already sung major roles with the Vienna State Opera, with well-received guest appearances at the Met, Covent Garden, the Opera-Bastille and elsewhere. The voice is full, bright, naturally and effortlessly produced: it has glamour. On the evidence of this recital, however, she is not yet a Lieder singer.
Part of the trouble is the recording, which is close but not quite in focus: she is, so to speak, at the front of the platform but rather too often her consonants are not clear. However, in most of these songs, she simply uses too much voice. Frustratingly enough, there is no sense that she does this because hers is essentially an operatic instrument that cannot easily be fined down to the intimacy of song. In Mahler’s “Nicht wieder-sehen!”, for example, she adopts a lovely mezza voce for the verse describing how the beloved died of grief, but uses a much more ample and far less expressive tone quality for the rest of the song. Nor does she characterize the songs with any special insight: in “Ich ging mit Lust”, which suits her voice very well, the sound itself is very beautiful and the florid passages are expertly negotiated, but there is little sense of the naive little story meaning very much. There ought, surely, to be some wit or glee to the sly “Um schlimme Kinder artig zu machen” (a spell to make naughty children good), and just a touch of humour to the self-mockery of “Selbstgefuhl”?
This rather generalized approach, short of detailed response to subtleties of word-setting, does no favours to the more fragile songs of Korngold and Alma Mahler, which emerge as pleasant enough but minor trifles as a consequence. More could have been made, by using less vocal resource, of some of Alma’s pretty songs and of Korngold’s interesting Op. 29, settings of Shakespeare in English that have not previously been recorded.'