Mezzo Alice Chung’s LIEDER ALIVE! Program

Peter Grünberg and Alice Chung (courtesy of LIEDER ALIVE!)

Early yesterday evening at the Noe Valley Ministry, LIEDER ALIVE! continued its 2023/24 Liederabend Series with a recital by mezzo Alice Chung, accompanied at the piano by Peter Grünberg. As an alumna of the Merola Opera Program in both 2017 and 2019, Chung is no stranger to San Francisco. However, this was my first opportunity to experience her performance in an art song recital.

The high point of the program took place during the second half with a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, a set of five settings of texts by Friedrich Rückert for which he scored accompaniment for both orchestra and piano. With the exception of “Um Mitternacht” (at midnight), these compositions present Mahler at his most elegantly understated. However, in the orchestral version, “Um Mitternacht” is the one setting that “pulls out all the stops,” so to speak, with both timpani and a full complement of brass instruments. That makes it the one song in the set that falls short in the piano version.

Chung was clearly in her comfort zone singing the entire collection. The control of her intensity made for viable compensation for the absence of that rich instrumentation. Mahler never provided a specific ordering for the five songs; and Chung presented “Um Mitternacht” as the central selection, serving as a “keystone” for the other four songs.

This allowed her to conclude with “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (I am lost to the world), a choice so heartbreaking that any thought of an encore was out of the question. Grünberg provided an “overture” for the set in the form of his own piano arrangement of the Adagietto movement from Mahler’s fifth symphony, which was composed around the same time as the Rückert-Lieder collection; but that arrangement did little to convey the subtleties of Mahler’s approach to rich polyphony.

The first half of the program was devoted almost entirely to songs by Johannes Brahms. This included the two songs in his Opus 91, where accompaniment is provided by viola as well as piano. At yesterday’s performance, Alexander String Quartet veteran Paul Yarbrough was the violist, and his balance with Chung and Grünberg could not have been better.

This was the closest the program came to being “seasonal,” since the second of the two songs begins with the viola playing the medieval Christmas carol “Joseph, lieber Joseph mein.” The program begin with the very first song that Brahms composed (“Liebestreu”), which was followed by the “Sapphische Ode” from Opus 94 and “Feldeinsamkeit” from Opus 86. Personally, I cannot get enough of Brahms’ art songs; and my cravings were given far more than a satisfactory account.

The only disappointment was the one selection to follow the Brahms songs before the intermission. This was the aria “D’amour l’ardente flamme” from Hector Berlioz’ opera La damnation de Faust. Taken as a whole, this opera was far from the composer’s finest hour. I have seen it staged only once (by the San Francisco Opera) and am in no rush to see it again. Furthermore, the composer’s strong suit was always the imaginative approach he could take to instrumentation, a strength that could not be found in yesterday’s piano accompaniment. Fortunately, both Brahms and Mahler more than merely compensated for the weakness of the Berlioz selection.