Yesterday afternoon at the Noe Valley Ministry, LIEDER ALIVE! was “first out of the gate” in launching the new concert season with the first program in its annual Liederabend (evening of songs) Series. The featured vocalist was soprano Sarah Cambidge. An Adler alumna, Cambidge made several impressive appearances at the War Memorial Opera House during the 2017–18 season. This recital provided her the opportunity to present her talents in a more intimate setting, accompanied at the piano by LIEDER ALIVE! artist-in-residence Peter Grünberg.
Villa Wesendonck in Zürich, where Wagner composed his Wesendonck Lieder collection (photograph by Ikiwaner, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
The program could not have been more Germanic. The first half was devoted to Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, the collection of five songs for female voice and piano setting poems by Mathilde Wesendonck. The intermission was then followed by the so-called Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss. These were originally composed for soprano and orchestra; but Boosey & Hawkes (B&H) published a piano version, supervised by Ernst Roth. Three of the poems Strauss set were by Herman Hesse; and they appeared as the first three songs in the B&H publications (orchestral and piano). These were “Frühling” (spring), “September,” and “Beim Schlafengehen” (when falling asleep), all arranged for piano by Max Wolff. Roth himself prepared the arrangement of the final song, “Im Abendrot” (at sunset).
It would probably be fair to say that both of these collections constitute the most operatic entries in the art song repertoire. Indeed, Wagner was working on Tristan und Isolde when he composed the Wesendonck Lieder; and two of those songs, “Im Treibhaus” (in the greenhouse) and “Träume” (dreams), are explicitly called “studies” for the opera score. Indeed, all five of the songs were subsequently orchestrated by Felix Mottl, the foremost Wagner conductor of his day; and, in my own listening experience, I have probably encountered the orchestra version more often than the original.
Nevertheless, there is a foundation of intimacy (perhaps a bit too much intimacy for whose aware of Wagner’s relationships with women) that is better served in the original piano version. Mind you, there is no shortage of intensity in Wesendonck’s texts; but Wagner establishes that intensity through subtle undercurrents, rather than through his more familiar techniques of operatic declamation. It was therefore more than a little disappointing that Cambidge brought her “opera voice” to her performance, rather than modulating her dynamics to the intimacy of the Noe Valley Ministry space. There were, of course, any number of passages in which one could appreciate her softer dynamics; but the climaxes tended to overwhelm the intimacy of the physical setting, leaving it to Grünberg to provide a more consistent account of the subtler dynamic levels.
The Strauss performance presented the same assets and liabilities. In this case, however, Strauss composed several extended passages for the orchestra, including a clearly deliberate and explicit citation of the “transfiguration” motif from “Death and Transfiguration.” Grünberg did his best to make his instrument sound as “orchestral” as possible; but, as was the case with Cambidge’s dynamic levels (which were as powerful for Strauss as they had been for Wagner), all of those decibels felt hopelessly out of place in the intimate Noe Valley setting.
To be fair, this may be a reflection of a personal bias. For better or worse, I have always approached art song recitals as another perspective on chamber music. Since I listen to chamber music in terms of the assets of the intimacy it affords, I tend to expect the same from art song. Noe Valley Ministry provides an excellent setting for intimate approaches to performance. Yesterday afternoon it felt as if little attention had been given to the natural affordances of the space.
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