Tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Paul Lewis brought the sentiments of Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte and Schubert’s Schwanengesang to life, writes Ivan Hewett.
This recital began with romantic song’s springtime, and then gave us a grand utterance from the genre’s full maturity. The first half had songs by Beethoven, including his song-cycle An die ferne Geliebte. The second gave us Schubert’s last song-cycle, Schwanengesang. Only 12 years separate them, but what a distance there is in emotional tone. Schubert ventures into strange, almost deranged areas of feeling that can make Beethoven’s evocations of May flowers and babbling brooks seem conventional in comparison.
And yet they never seemed conventional in these performances from Mark Padmore and pianist Paul Lewis. With the lightest touch — a pause here, a splash of unusual colour there — they brought the sentiments to life.
There’s a moment in the song Abendlied where the words tell of the soul’s desire to float free of its mortal frame. Padmore gave the words an almost bodiless yearning quality, and Lewis held the tempo a fraction longer than expected. Just for a moment the music floated free of its own mortal frame.
Beethoven’s set is actually more radical than Schubert’s, in the sense that it really is a cycle where one song leads seamlessly to the next. Lewis’s handling of the tiny piano transitions was brilliantly done, leading us to a new tempo and feeling so deftly that we couldn’t spot the transition. The return of the opening melody at the end sounded like something regretful from long ago, even though in clock time it was a mere 20 minutes.
In Schubert’s Schwanengesang the feelings press more urgently. Padmore may not have the granitic power of some singers, but there’s an emotional nakedness about his singing which made his performance of these dark, strange songs really strike home. He caught the way conventional romantic longing turns to desperate urgency in Frühlingsehnsucht. And in Kriegers Ahnung the two performers found a strange, haunted tone which caught the oddity of the sentiments. Is it his beloved the warrior longs for, or the peace of death?
In among the storm-tossed and ghost-haunted sentiments there are more cheerful songs, which in a way are more difficult to bring off — especially the last, Die Taubenpost, which was tacked on by the original publisher as an afterthought. This genial little parable of love’s longing can feel like an anticlimax, unless the performers make its ingenuous simplicity seem touching – which is exactly what they did.