The Daily Telegraph - Features
A rare and wonderful Romantic thrill
Julia Kleiter
Wigmore Hall, London W1 ★★★★★
The German soprano Julia Kleiter is a rare visitor to these shores, though she did make an appearance as a wonderfully pearly-toned countess in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House back in 2019. On Monday night at the Wigmore Hall, she showed that same spotless integrity of tone and tautly-spun vocal line, now harnessed to the very different demands of late-Romantic song.
She offered a shrewd programme with some sure-fire audience-pleasers, including Richard Strauss’s Morgen (Tomorrow) and, to begin with, Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-lieder. These songs are much-loved in their orchestral version, and it’s a challenge to recreate their horn-and-harp-drenched delicacy and yearning in the confines of a song recital.
Yet Kleiter and her excellent pianist Michael Gees rose to it wonderfully. The prismatic variety of colour they summoned had much to do with it, but it was also their special way of giving space to significant moments, allowing the ends of phrases to radiate into the infinite before continuing. This tinged their often small, intimate sound with a sense of majesty. That same feeling of time being stretched returned in Strauss’s blissful Morgen, where it had the paradoxical effect of putting us on the edge of our seats and laying us into a trance at the same time.
But the evening wasn’t all conventionally romantic. We heard four very early and surprisingly mystical songs composed by the young Arnold Schoenberg, before he was seized by his world-historical mission to become the most hated musical modernist. Here Gees and Kleiter found an altogether different tone, uncanny and misty.
We also got three rarely-heard songs by Strauss, based on Ophelia’s songs from Hamlet, where Kleiter showed real dramatic flair. She relished the jaunty sarcasm of the young maid in Good Morning, It’s St Valentine’s Day and projected the strange switchbacks between tenderness, grief and jokiness in They Carried Him Naked on a Bier. And in Brahms’s Eternal Love, she found a tone of inconsolable tragedy – a shocking change from the almost cosy tenderness of the Brahms songs she sang before it.
The evening’s only misstep was an improvised rendering into song of Maria Magdalena’s lines from Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, The Last Temptation of Christ. Despite Kleiter’s expressive singing and Gee’s tremulous harmonies, it was frustrating: the words were only occasionally audible. That aside, this was a wonderful recital that reminded us of the range as well as the depth of Romantic song.