German soprano’s impressive premiere
There’s an unmistakable air of sturdiness about Dorothea Röschmann, a sense that everything she does is fastidious and well supported. In her first local recital on Friday, Feb. 16, presented in Berkeley’s Hertz Hall by Cal Performances, the German soprano put those gifts to good use.
The result was perhaps more honorable than truly illuminating, a demonstration of how much can be achieved within carefully circumscribed borders. And when Röschmann did manage to break through the bounds of propriety — to conjure up an unruly surge of emotion or poetic transformation — a listener began to understand how much more was being kept in check.
Röschmann’s program offered a case study in solid structural design. Together with the excellent pianist Malcolm Martineau, she devoted herself to the German song repertoire — not individually or piecemeal, but in self-reinforcing sets that provided a thematic backdrop for each leg of the recital.
There were four Schubert settings devoted to the poetry of Mignon in Goethe’s novel “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” and Schumann’s wondrous (and too rarely heard) late group of “Maria Stuart Songs.” Mahler’s “Rückert Lieder” and Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder” completed the program, along with a Schubertian standalone (“Nachtstück”) that sounded oddly unaligned in this context.
To all of this repertoire, Röschmann brought a tonal quality that was robust and well-upholstered almost to a fault. In other repertoire (especially Handel and Mozart) she’s capable of deploying a lighter, more silvery touch; but here the goal seemed to
be grandeur and firmness.
At her best, Röschmann was able to temper that quality with a darkly Romantic expressivity to forge a communicative vein at once noble and tender. That was most evident — and perhaps most apt — in the Schumann set, which was by far the high point of the recital.
Schumann’s five songs, written from the viewpoint of the doomed Scottish queen, are steeped in a virtuosic blend of hauteur and vulnerability; you could never mistake the protagonist for one of the love-stricken maidens that romp, gaily or unhappily, through most German lieder. In their performance, Röschmann and Martineau caught that combination perfectly.
At other points, Röschmann shone where the music best suited the imposing weightiness of her vocal palette — in the final song (“Traüme,” “Dreams”) of the Wagner set, for example, which worked its way toward a potent expressive climax, or in Schubert’s zesty and heartfelt “Kennst du das Land” (“Do you know the land”).
But there were times when the music seemed to call for a dreamy, shimmery quality that wasn’t in Röschmann’s arsenal. The elusive, quasispontaneous ruminations of Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I am lost to the world”) have not always sounded so earthbound.
The encore, Liszt’s tiny valentine “Es muss ein Wunderbares sein” (“It must be a wonderful thing”), offered a delectable final burst of pure emotion. It was everything you want in an encore.