Most of these songs (but with some important exceptions) suit the singer’s voice well enough, but how well they themselves are served by her art is another matter. To some extent, of course, the voice conditions the art: for instance, it is hardly possible for a singer to match the dramatic quality of Wolf’s writing in the third verse of Kennst du das Land? (the dragons, rocks and billows) if the voice lacks resources. Verborgenheit needs warmth of tone as well as feeling, a reserve of mezzo quality in the soprano voice. Begegnung is a storm-song with a light touch; still, the shyly trysting maiden who is its subject is not its narrator, and the voice of the observer at the start needs to be sturdy enough to stand up to the piano’s (albeit restrained) evocation of the previous night’s storm. But these are relatively incidental matters; essential is the communication of a living, re-creative response.
Take Schlafendes Jesuskind, where, as in Auf ein altes Bild, the immediate subject is the symbolism observed in a painting of the Virgin and Child. The ‘Holz der Schmerzen’ (wood of sorrows) must in some way find a response in the singer’s voice, as (for example) it does with Arleen Auger but scarcely here with Hendricks. Or In der Fruhe, where it is vital to have a response to the change of mood, with its musical modulation, at the point where the night’s anxieties are allayed and the soul rejoices: again the reaction is vivid in Auger’s performance, dim in Hendricks’. The Mignon songs are more expressively sung, but, though they are ‘in character’, the intervening and contrasting Philine is not: the nonchalant smile and playful sensuality hardly begin to take on a convincing personal identity.
Roland Pontinen, the pianist, is a highly skilled and observant artist, and in the first song of all, Auf eine Christblume I, he gives a taste of his sensitivity in seeking out the ambiguities of ‘the darkling grove’. But the semi-staccato playing of the storm-figure in Begegnung has questionable validity, and in Der Gartner the rather dreamy clipclop is hardly that of a prancing (‘hintanzet’) horse.
On the whole, I wouldn’t say that the undoubted gifts of singer and pianist and the genius of poet and composer are very satisfactorily fused in this recital