Linda Finnie is still an artist underrated in her own land. Feted at Bayreuth as Fricka in the current Ring, she appears all too little in opera in this country and not that often in concert. Her strong, dramatic mezzo should be encountered regularly at Covent Garden. That said, I have to say I was disappointed with the major offerings in this recital. The voice and its manipulation is for the most part satisfactory; so is the obvious intelligence in the treatment of words. What seriously damages the readings of the cycles are the lumbering speeds. As the singer's tone is already on the heavy side, every effort should have been made to obviate this through swifter tempos. As it is, in almost every case those alighted on here are debilitatingly slow, a prevailing fault among many Lieder singers today that seems to be caused by a mistaken idea that they somehow enhance depth of interpretation.
In the Schumann some of the songs almost come to a rhythmic standstill through this deliberate treatment so that the sensitive phrasing is set at naught. Go to either Fassbaender (DG) or Ferrier (Decca), two equally deep and appealing versions, and you immediately hear why quicker speeds are the right ones and in no way invalidate a strongly emotional reading. Unfortunately, Brahms's Vier ernste Gesange suffer an even worse fate, not least because excessive rubato is here added to the turgid pace—in each song Finnie is around a minute slower than either Ferrier (Decca, best of the contralto versions) or Hotter (EMI, my preference over all), and both those performances are helped by more perceptive pianists.
There is some consolation here, however, in Finnie and Legge's moving, finely shaped account of the Mary Stuart songs, Schumann's last and greatly underrated compositions in this field. She and her fellow interpreters also perform the two Brahms songs with viola obbligato, Op. 91, excellently. Here the broad sweep of Finnie's singing is well suited—and her speeds are not much different from von Otter's on her recent, recommendable DG recital. The recorded ambience at Snape is a little too reverberant for my taste.'