This offering places Banse and Johnson among the most thoughtful and convincing of Schumann interpreters in the history of recording the composer’s Lieder. From start to finish, in well-loved pieces and in others that will be new discoveries to many, the pair at once work in close concord and get to the heart of Schumann’s very particular genius.
The pair wholly dispel the oft-repeated view that Schumann’s later songs are by and large failures: it is simply that the older man wrote differently from his younger, romantically exuberant self. Thus the 1852 settings of Mary Stuart unerringly capture the soul of the troubled Queen’s predicaments through the most concise means. Not a florid or untoward gesture is allowed to destroy the mood of sustained concentration and intimate musings. Banse brings to the songs just the right sense of a person sharing her innermost thoughts with us, the mezzo-like warmth of her lower voice gainfully employed, Johnson’s piano communing in consort with the voice.
Seven months earlier, Schumann showed himself equally in sympathy with the poems ofElisabeth Kulmann (Op. 104), a susceptible girl who died at the age of 17, his writing here simple and apparently artless. The composer, amazingly, thinks himself into the thoughts of the imaginative, fanciful young poetess; so does his interpreter, Banse, here using a lighter, more palpitating tone. She is just as discriminating when preceding each song with Schumann’s spoken introductions.
She also recites the last poem of Chamisso’s Frauenliebe, which Schumann declined to set. In the cycle itself she sings with consistent warmth and understanding; indeed I would pay her and Johnson the compliment of not making any comparisons, so satisfying is their interpretation, keenly paced, finely etched in terms of verbal emphasis, above all conveying the kaleidoscope of a woman’s feelings depicted within. Johnson’s commentary on the cycle is predictably enlightening, as – of course – are his detailed observations on the rest of the programme.
Some of the separate songs find Schumann momentarily nodding, but do listen to Blondels Lied, a ballad-like piece of great ingenuity, and to the well-known Kartenlegerin, to which Banse brings an irresistible panache. Here, as throughout, she recalls the unaffected manner and outgoing timbre of the great Elisabeth Grummer. Praise cannot be higher. The faultless recording completes one’s pleasure in a very special issue.'