Schubert Sung by a Young Tenor on the Rise

Tenor Ilker Arcayürek (from the event page for his San Francisco Performances debut)

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances presented the second recital in its three-concert Discovery Series. As the home page for this series observes, the series “presents artists who already have their feet firmly planted along the trail of auspicious music careers.” Last night’s recitalist was Turkish-born Austrian tenor Ilker Arcayürek; and he brought his credentials to San Francisco with a program consisting entirely of Franz Schubert’s D. 911 song cycle Winterreise (winter journey). His accompanist for this San Francisco debut performance was British pianist Simon Lepper, also making his San Francisco debut.

In the program notes for the text sheet prepared for last night, Eric Bromberger asserted:

Winterreise has no plot, no development, no rising action, and no satisfying conclusion.

I would argue that this claim is a bit on the extreme side. Schubert composed D. 911 in two phases, each setting twelve poems by Wilhelm Müller; and he may not, originally, have had a “big picture” in mind. Nevertheless, a case can be made that the overall D. 911 libretto is a narrative, even if the usual components of narrative that Bromberger enumerated emerge through implication, rather than explicit declaration.

As is the case with those prototypical “hero narratives” that so occupied the attention of Joseph Campbell (and his uncredited predecessor Vladimir Propp), “plot line” unfolds as a journey, exactly as Schubert’s title says. The journey begins with the departure from a town in which the protagonist is a stranger, who leaves as a result of some unidentified loss (the first verse suggesting the loss was an amorous one). The 22 poems that follow then serve as way stations on that journey, each of which unfolds a different phase of retrospection. Then, in the final poem, the protagonist encounters the hurdy-gurdy man, as alienated as the protagonist. Bearing in mind the impact that Campbell had on the Star Wars narrative, it is almost as if Luke has found his Yoda; but, in the overall plan of D. 911, what matters is that the discovery marks the end of the journey.

Because of the way in which D. 911 was composed, there are two schools of through regarding its performance. Those who prioritize the narrative tend to present the cycle as an uninterrupted journey. Others prefer to insert a pause after the twelfth song to denote the two phases in which the music was created. Arcayürek took the former approach; and he served up a thoroughly convincing account of a tightly-integrated single narrative. One might say that the path of Schubert’s journey runs through 24 metaphors. Arcayürek clearly grasped the uniqueness of each of those metaphors and shaped his rhetoric of delivery accordingly. As a result, each song shone with its own unique qualities, while the overall expression never allowed the listener to lose sight of the overall journey path.

The only weakness in the evening came from Lepper’s accompaniment. If Arcayürek brought compelling clarity to every note he sang, there were too many instances when Lepper blurred the individual notes in the more rapid passages. Lepper seemed to lose sight of the fact that Schubert’s skills in writing for the piano were as rich in logic, grammar, and rhetoric as were any of his vocal lines. Lepper’s execution felt too often as if it were buried in the marks on the paper, rather than grasping and realizing the many details that endowed this “accompaniment music” with its own unique contribution to the overall narrative.