A moving, if bleak, lamentation
Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano Barbican
As if things weren’t gloomy enough already, Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano darkened the Barbican auditorium on Wednesday and performed a recital of songs devoted to the tragedies and victims of war (a CD recording of the same programme was released earlier in October).
This is their contribution to the Armistice 100 solemnities: I can’t say that I found any of it uplifting, let alone easily enjoyable, but the thoughtful artistry and emotional commitment of both singer and pianist was impressive.
Three of the more ghoulish songs from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn proved the evening’s weakest element. Even in his maturity (his spindly frame, boyish demeanour and restless platform deportment belie his nearly-54 years), Bostridge remains a light lyric tenor with neither a secure top nor a rich lower register.
This isn’t an instrument designed for music with such strong roots in a rough-edged folk idiom, and Bostridge was led to compensate for his lack of authentic vocal power by resorting to a rather too fussily effortful range of colours, intonations and histrionic gestures, compounded by Pappano’s furiously energetic pianism. It all lacked spontaneity and directness.
Bostridge was on safer ground with Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied, a cycle of six songs by the little-known Rudi Stephan, who died in 1915 on the Eastern Front at the age of 27. These are a find, perfumed with the decadent sensuality of pre-war Vienna, and Bostridge and Pappano relished all their sophisticated intricacies.
The first half ended with music by another young casualty of war – George Butterworth, who fell at the Somme in 1916. His cycle of AE Housman’s poems A Shropshire Lad is a pastoral affair much simpler than Rudi Stephan’s, but nothing in the entire recital gripped me more than its eerie dialogue between the living and dead, “Is my team ploughing”, vividly dramatised by both singer and pianist.
After the interval came four Kurt Weill songs to texts by Walt Whitman associated with the American Civil War: these are short of the instant appeal of Weill’s Brecht settings. Finally, a further four songs from Britten’s late cycle Who are these children?, to verse by William Soutar.
Works of bleak blood-stained lamentation, they make no concessions to facile charm. Bostridge and Pappano honoured all their intensity and reaped a half-minute of rapt silence at the conclusion. As an encore, Schubert’s Litanei, sung with exquisite legato, brought some balm of consolation.