Recital

Sunday, 28 February 2010, 5:00 pm
Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, New York

Simon Keenlyside (baritone)
Pedja Muzijevic (piano)

Schumann: Dichterliebe

Wolf: Four Lieder on poems by Eduard Mörike
Gesang Weylas
Heimweh
Auf eine Christblume II
Lied vom Winde

Schubert:
An Sylvia
Die Einsiedelei
Verklärung
Freiwilliges Versinken
Gruppe aus dem Tartarus
Himmelsfunken
Ständchen
Die Sterne
Auf der Bruck

Encores:

1. Wolf: Um Mitternacht
2. Schubert: Der Einsame
3. Schubert: Nachtviolen

What the critics say

Schumann’s Poetic Side, Poured Richly Into Songs

It took conviction, and some degree of courage, for the British baritone Simon Keenlyside to perform Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” (“A Poet’s Love”) in his recital at Alice Tully Hall on Sunday. Not because this work is so difficult, although it is, but because it is so familiar, probably Schumann’s most performed song cycle. Moreover, the lush expressivity and aching lyricism of the music almost defines Romanticism. So making this cycle sound fresh is not easy.

Mr. Keenlyside, an elegant and intelligent artist, working with the pianist Pedja Muzijevic, gave a sensitive and remarkably immediate performance for the audience that packed the hall on Sunday. The 16 short songs of this 30-minute cycle, Schumann’s settings of poems by Heinrich Heine, tell of a young man in love who meets rejection and sinks into alternate states of pensive heartache and bleak bitterness.

From the first one, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (“In the Wondrous Month of May”), with its poignant, deceptively simple vocal line, Mr. Keenlyside captured the ambiguity that runs through the cycle, even in the songs that seemingly attest to the poet’s bliss. With his robust, warm voice, he brought a blend of yearning and reticence to his singing, without a trace of overwrought emotion. And Mr. Muzijevic played with subtle beauty, allowing the piercing dissonances in Schumann’s chromatic harmonies to emerge without any sense of making points or underlining complexities.

On the opera stage Mr. Keenlyside is one of the most sophisticated actors in the business. While acting is not really involved in a song recital, he found an effective balance, sometimes facing his audience and singing with gripping directness, sometimes embodying the confused, awkward poet, shuffling in place restlessly. But singing with honesty, sensitive phrasing and crisp German diction came first.

After the vehemently despairing final phrases of the last song, “Die alten, bösen Lieder” (“The Bad Old Songs”), as Mr. Muzijevic played the solo piano epilogue, Mr. Keenlyside stood almost motionless, like a steadfast soldier of love who has suffered a stinging defeat but will not let on. The ovation was tumultuous.

After intermission came four Wolf songs, then a group of nine selected Schubert songs, Mr. Keenlyside’s attempt to create, in effect, a personal song cycle. Several of the songs were recital rarities, like the curious “Gruppe aus dem Tartarus” (“Scene From Hades”), in which a fitful vocal line is shrouded in strange piano tremolos and murky harmonies.

Mr. Keenlyside dedicated his third and final encore, Schubert’s tender “Nachtviolen,” to his daughter who, he explained, was about to be born back home “halfway around the world”; this is his second child. Work is keeping him in New York right now. Mr. Keenlyside is also immersed in intensive rehearsals for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of a 19th-century French work, Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet,” in which he sings the demanding title role. It opens on March 16. Talk about artistic dedication.

Arlene Judith Klotzko, ConcertoNet.com

Several years ago, during an interview with the Guardian, Simon Keenlyside said that “[e]verything that happens in your life – the good and the bad – is somewhere in my box of song texts or lieder or French song.” This comment goes a long way toward explaining the extraordinary sense of authenticity, intensity, and immediacy with which he sings. There is nothing artificial or applied. This is not to suggest that Keenlyside in recital merely serves up some sort of artless stream-of-consciousness musical autobiography. Far from it. He’s a consummate artist. He is also a visual artist, well known for his marvelously mischievous caricatures. Uniquely in my experience of recitals, Keenlyside imparted a visual dimension to the music.

First up on the program was the perennial Dichterliebe, sung with his beautiful, richly resonant voice and keen sensitivity to dynamic nuance. The songs reminded me of quick charcoal drawings or water color studies — with a telling gesture here, a dab of color there. Keenlyside revealed a mastery of line but also of color. His palette was so varied, extending from his sonorous lower range (in “Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome”) to a ravishing head voice. But he did not hesitate to bleach out all the color when the text called for it, letting his voice go white. His word painting throughout was superb. Two particularly fine examples were in “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” on the words “mein Sehnen und Verlangen” (my longing and desire) and in “Aus meinem Tränen spriessen,” on the words, “Lied der Nachtigall (song of the nightingale). His diction and phrasing were also excellent.

In addition, Keenlyside, noted for his on stage physicality in opera roles, conveyed so much by simple means – the tilt of his head, a hand gesture, or a pose. And he seemed to draw the audience and the space of Alice Tully Hall into the world of the songs. They became miniatures of exterior and interior landscapes. Keenlyside lavished attention and artistry on every song, but they never felt precious or overdone. And he had a superb collaborator in pianist, Pedja Muzijevic, whose contributions were fine throughout, but most notable in the Schumann, which is almost a duet. Highlights of this section of the program included a hushed, gorgeously sung “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen” (where he seemed to draw us into magical space) and a poignantly vulnerable “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet.”

Next, Mr. Keenlyside moved on to four songs by Hugo Wolf, settings of poetry by Eduard Mörike. For this section, he gave us a variety of nature studies and, in “Auf eine Christblume II,” a lyrically stunning aural and visual image of a butterfly in flight. In “Lied vom Winde,” Keenlyside showed his mastery of both declamatory and lyrical types of lieder singing.

Last on the program were nine songs by Franz Schubert, an interesting mix of the familiar, “An Sylvia” and “Ständchen,” for example, and less well known songs like “Verklärung” and “Himmelsfunken.” “Ständchen” was simply enchanting – sung with great tenderness and charm and just the right touch of rubato. It ended with a smile and a sigh. But it was the last two that were, for me, the highpoint of the recital. “Verklärung” (Transfiguration) was a tour de force. Keenlyside alternated declamatory passages with those that were more lyrical. In the latter, he bleached the color from his voice and used half voice to magical effect, as he sang of floating upward out of life and the world vanishing amid angel harmony. “Himmelsfunken” (Intimations of Heaven) was sung with soft, utterly ravishing head voice and seamless legato to evoke God’s breath.

In a song I know from Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings, “Die Sterne,” Keenlyside looked up into the distance as he sang. He was under the flickering stars and so were we. There were three encores, the most moving of which was lyrical “Nachtviolen,” which he dedicated to his daughter who was about to be born.

This was not his first recital in New York. But there was a particular excitement in the hall, almost certainly perhaps because he was soon to make his role debut as Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera, just across the road. So this recital was a bit of a preview. And it was a fascinating one because, just as Keenlyside sings opera with a lieder singer’s sense of text, he brings to lieder a keen theatricality, particularly evident in his use of space. He will be back at the Met next season as Posa in Nicholas Hytner’s new production of Don Carlo. He will also return to Alice Tully Hall for a recital with Emmanuel Ax.

Meanwhile, he can be heard on a marvelous CD in the Wigmore Hall Live series, which – happily – includes several songs he sang in recital, including the Schubert and Wolf lieder I particularly liked, as well as songs by Faure, Ravel, and an encore, Poulenc’s “Hotel.” The pianist on the disc is the remarkable Macolm Martineau, who will also be back in New York next season, in a Carnegie Hall recital with Bryn Terfel.

Michael Miller, The Berkshire review, 13.3.2010

There could not have been a more extreme contrast between Renée Fleming’s approach to Strauss’ Four Last Songs, recently reviewed in these pages, and Simon Keenlyside’s in this recital. For Fleming, the texts of Strauss’ songs are cushioned in her gorgeous production and phrasing, while for Keenlyside the text is the beginning and end of a performance which is essentially dramatic, no matter what beautiful moments his extremely varied—and variable—voice may produce along the way, and of course these moments are entirely expressive in purpose. Acting is second nature to him. In most of his selections he created a character before he uttered a phrase.

His absorption in the text begins with his highly personal selection of his material. Among the great songs familiar to every Lied enthusiast, he has sought out relative rarities of special interest to himself. In this recital it was Schubert who furnished the opportunity. So many treasures lie hidden among his extensive vocal oeuvre that digging through his less-known songs in recital is always an exciting and fruitful endeavor.

Keenlyside’s adventurousness doesn’t stop there, however. I’d say it was brave, if not a bit foolhardy to begin his recital with Schumann’s Dichterliebe and its perilous high registers. In the end, of course, he produced an interesting and compelling performance, but his voice took several minutes to settle, and in “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” in the revealing acoustics of the new Starr Theatre, we heard a rather hard top and a variable middle, with a few rather white tones. Eventually, the true character of his voice came through, and we were able to savor his rich low register and the creamy integration of his upper ranges in “Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome,” and the rest. Characteristically, he sang Schumann’s great cycle in character. At the very beginning he adopted the shy and distracted manner of a young poet, absorbed in words and in his own inner emotions, and given to almost gauche outbursts in his most intense states of mind. We get the impression that Keenlyside’s poet might be a bit unstable. We cannot rule out moments of insanity. In this way Keenlyside not only shows himself to be an operatic singer, who can use his dramatic gifts to reveal new dimensions in the more intimate Lied, which he obviously dearly loves. It is also worth noting that he is entirely able to project character and drama within the confines of a recital, unlike his Metropolitan Opera colleagues, who seem uncomfortable away from costumes and sets, when they sing in concert performances for James Levine. In fact, it has been fashionable for some years to perform song cycles as small monodramas, using costumes and props, as Christine Schäfer did in her filmed performance of Dichterliebe—from the bath! There is nothing so self-conscious in Mr. Keenlyside’s approach. He works without costume, props, or stage director, and his character is entirely his own, intuitive creation. Seen in the context of contemporary Regielied and traditional performances, in which singers straightforwardly sing the set text, he occupies a middle ground, in which he still retains some of the naiveté of the classic voices. The effect can be deceptive. My companion, a leading actor, director, and writer in solo theater, was inclined to take Keenlyside’s manner as his own, reflecting even a lack of assurance as a performer, since the dramatic component lacked the final polish of a directed performance, as well as the distancing that comes with it. In any case, it is clear enough that Keenlyside’s characterization was inspired by the text. In order to accommodate Schumann’s intensely internalized psychological foundations and Heine’s extravagant imagery, which includes historical monuments like the great wine cask of Heidelberg and the Rhine itself as direct referents for the dimensions of the poet’s emotions. Of course there are several cherished performances from the past in which no such effort is made to account for Heine’s imagery and rhetoric, while still doing justice to the expressiveness of his verse. Keenlyside’s elaboration is not strictly necessary, and, while on a dramatic level he expands the work, on the other, he contains its impact by making its expression relative to a psychic center of his own creation. The performance, while not vocally perfect for the reasons I have mentioned, was constantly engaging, expressive, but free of the hysterical excesses some singers bring to it. It also had its moments—many of them, in fact—of beguiling vocal beauty, and elegant phrasing.

In his set of Wolf songs, Keenlyside entered a more rarified aesthetic world, colored by the intense perception of landscapes and flowers, and beyond that the imagining of places so exotic that they exist in the imagination alone. There wasn’t as much room for character building in these individual songs. Keenlyside brought us rather into a fin de siècle salon, where we cold immerse ourselves in Wolf’s lush harmonies and rich melodic lines. Vocally and expressively, these were all on the highest level. It was a joy to hear Wolf so splendidly sung, and with full attention to the poems on which they are based. A song by Wolf is as much a declamation as any of Schubert’s songs of that nature.

Keenlyside’s Schubert set appropriately included his purely lyric, as well as settings of more declamatory poems. In this way he managed to give his audience a fairly comprehensive view of the cultural range of a Schubertiade, which embraced broader humanistic and scientific interests, as well as the lyric and mythology. As a former zoologist he shows a very appealing affection for the Naturwissenschaft of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially the charming observations of animals and insects, which are not so commonly noticed among Schubert’s Lieder. He began with one of Schubert’s most beloved works, his setting of Bauernfeld’s translation of Shakespeare’s song to Sylvia. If you focus on the words, as Keenlyside does, you will notice that Bauernfled’s phrasing and tone are quite different from the Shakespearean musical interlude. Here it becomes a classical laus amatoria, not to mention possible mistakes in English, e.g. kindness = Kindheit (?!). Next came Einsiedelei, a humanistic characterization of a hermit, whose retreat brings him close to simplicity and to nature. Herder’s free version of Pope’s “The Dying Christian to his Soul” is an even more far-reaching humanistic reinterpretation of Pope’s more conventionally Christian sentiments. Schubert’s setting of Mayrhofer’s interesting “Freiwilliges Versinken” makes an excellent pendant to the Pope, proceeding as it does in the opposite direction, but with equal transcendence, as well as a step further in Goethean classicism. Schiller’s powerful and well-known “Gruppe aus dem Tartarus” fully asserts classical myth, while Silbert’s “Himmelsfunken” returns to the metaphysics of Pope and Mayrhofer. Rellstab’s “Ständchen,” perhaps the rival of “An Sylvia” as Schubert’s most familiar song offered some comfort food before a foray into the mystic Karl Gottfried von Leitner’s reflections on the stars, “Die Sterne.” Here Keenlyside went to considerable lengths to convey Leitner’s sense of wonder in contemplating the stars in the heavens. In spite of his modern Cambridge education, Keenlyside clearly has a warm sympathy with this esoteric sensibility. The group concluded with a setting of Ernst Schulze’s “Auf der Bruck,” one of Schubert’s less familiar settings of a poem about travel on horseback. This was a brilliant selection, combining as it did the familiar and the less familiar Schubert. The songs were vividly realized in terms of Mr. Keenlyside’s commendable purposes, although I have heard more elegant performances of the “Ständchen” in a more formalistic spirit.

As a whole the program was rather short, taking into account the encores which lay ahead of him. Interspersed with often personal commentary, Simon Keenlyside offered yet more wonderful Schubert and Wolf, until his voice showed some signs of fatigue.

The excellent Pedja Muzijevic, a brilliant pianist who happens to play well with other musicians, provided an accompaniment which was constantly interesting and individual without distracting the audience from his singer. I was as delighted with the afternoon with Simon Keenlyside, who might be discribed as a more than worthy successor to Heinrich Rehkemper, as his many wildly enthusiastic fans.

Fred Cohn, Opera News, June 2010

He could almost be the Accidental Baritone. In his first moments onstage, Simon Keenlyside fidgets like a restless adolescent. His suit fits well enough, but he wears it uncomfortably, as if his parents had made him don it for church. He glances toward the wings, raising the question of whether he’d rather be back there than facing a hall full of admiring strangers.

But when he starts to sing, it’s clear that the tics and twitches are just the byproducts of an aesthetic process so pure, so focused that the incidentals of stage deportment hardly matter. In his February 28 Alice Tully Hall Schumann–Wolf–Schubert recital, Keenlyside so thoroughly immersed himself in the material that he hardly seemed to be performing: the music moved through him, as if it were an electric current and he were its conduit. Schumann’s Dichterliebe, which served as the first half of the program, emerged as one huge statement. Keenlyside seemed to pursue the musical argument so passionately that he couldn’t be stopped; only when he and pianist Pedja Muzijevic took a brief pause some halfway through, before “Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen,” did it register that we were hearing a series of individual songs. Later, when a cell phone started ringing toward the beginning of Schubert’s “Ständchen,” Keenlyside visibly reacted, but it was telling that he didn’t let the dreadful intrusion ruin his concentration; if anything, if led him into a reading that much more rapt and concentrated.

Keenlyside’s tone was beautiful throughout its range, warm and freely produced, save for an occasional low note that didn’t fully sound. Most notable was his mastery of German. The language can be treacherous for a non-native speaker, with the consonants acting as small stumbling blocks, momentarily cutting off the flow of sound. But Keenlyside sang through the consonants: by sounding the note a microsecond before the consonant was attacked, he was able to articulate the text while maintaining a legato singing line.

One didn’t attend to technique when Keenlyside sang, though, but to emotion. His technical mastery simply allowed him to achieve his expressive effects unimpeded by the mechanics of singing. His humanity was never more in evidence than when he dedicated his last encore, Schubert’s “Nachtviolen,” to his soon-to-be-born daughter. Quirks and all, Keenlyside presented himself to us as a human being — one whose emotional generosity lets him lead an audience to the expressive core of a song.