SCHUMANN Liederkreis. Kernerlieder (Goerne)

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Robert Schumann

Genre:

Vocal

Label: Harmonia Mundi

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 54

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: HMM90 2353

HMM90 2353. SCHUMANN Liederkreis. Kernerlieder (Goerne)

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Liederkreis Robert Schumann, Composer
Leif Ove Andsnes, Piano
Matthias Goerne, Baritone
Robert Schumann, Composer
(12) Gedichte Robert Schumann, Composer
Leif Ove Andsnes, Piano
Matthias Goerne, Baritone
Robert Schumann, Composer
'Short, maliciously sentimental, and written in the folk style’ was Schumann’s apt verdict on the pithy verses of Heine’s Buch der Lieder, chosen for his Op 24 Liederkreis. True to form, Schumann often ignores or softens the malice. In essence these songs, ‘composed with much passion and love’ for Clara, are vignettes of frustrated or lost love. Where Heine can rail or sneer, Schumann, typically, dreams; and no Lieder-singer does reverie, rapt or troubled, better than Matthias Goerne.

Two decades ago the young baritone recorded a fine Liederkreis with Ashkenazy (Decca, 5/98). Now in his early 50s, Goerne still sings with a scrupulous care for legato and broad, sculpted phrasing. Not a note is starved or stinted, while his clear, expressive diction remains a model. With widening operatic experience (he is in demand as Wozzeck, Amfortas and Wotan), his deep, warm, soft-grained baritone has darkened further and acquired a seam of iron at forte and above. In partnership with the ever-sentient Leif Ove Andsnes, lighter of touch than Ashkenazy on the earlier recording, Goerne embraces and intensifies each shade of Schumann’s rueful, confiding melancholy. But the contrasts are that much more dramatic than in his earlier recording, whether in the bitterly incisive ‘Es treibt mich hin’ – Heine’s dawdling hours given a serious run for their money – or the oscillations between lyrical yearning and feverish, yet unforced, declamation in an unusually urgent ‘Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden’. Like many baritones, Goerne transposes the songs down, but inconsistently – sometimes by a semitone, sometimes a tone, sometimes a third. In the process he skews Schumann’s carefully planned key sequence, which will worry some listeners more than others.

Goerne and Andsnes are just as compelling in Schumann’s predominantly dark-toned Kerner songs, Op 35, with their recurrent images of wandering, loneliness and lost love. True, he tends to sound too sternly imposing in the cycle’s few extrovert songs. The uninhibited al fresco joy of ‘Wanderlied’ and the bounding ‘Wanderung’ does not come as easily to him as it does to, say, Christian Gerhaher, in his superb recent recording with Gerold Huber (Sony, 2/19). But he is in his element in the introspective songs, whether in a mesmerically sustained and characterised ‘Stirb, Lieb’ und Freud’ (where Andsnes eloquently sifts Schumann’s neo-Bachian counterpoint), a secretive ‘Stille Liebe’, truly innig, as the composer asks, or a nobly sung ‘Auf das Trinkglas eines verstorbenen Freundes’, devoid of sentimentality. A word, too, for Andsnes’s sensitive timing and shading of Schumann’s dreamy and/or quizzical postludes.

In his 1998 recording of Op 35 with Eric Schneider (Decca), Goerne lingered dangerously in the Schumannised bel canto of ‘Stille Tränen’, the cycle’s obvious ‘hit’ number. Taking a more flowing tempo and thinking through the rests, he now catches the ambivalent nocturnal mood to perfection, abetted by Andsnes’s acute weighting and shaping of the pervasive repeated chords. Other baritones, including Gerhaher and Wolfgang Holzmair (Philips, 2/14), have brought more light and shade to this great cycle. But if you respond to Goerne’s peculiarly intense, concentrated art, as I do in most moods, the rewards here are deep and enduring.

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