Born in Switzerland in 1886, Othmar Schoeck is one of those intriguing figures in 20th-century European music who hovered on the fringes of modernism without ever quite committing to the cause. In Britain his music is rarely heard, and recordings of it are infrequent too. But in 2009 Christian Gerhaher followed the example of his mentor, the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, in recording Schoeck’s Notturno for baritone and string quartet, and he began his latest Wigmore Hall recital with this extraordinary work, in partnership with as exceptional a collection of string players, led by Isabelle Faust, as one could imagine for such a concert today.
Notturno is effectively a song cycle, setting nine poems by Nikolaus Lenau and a brief text by Gottfried Keller grouped into five movements. As in much of Schoeck’s finest music, especially his songs, the mood is sombre, even despairing at times, using a musical language that’s densely chromatic and teeters on the edge of atonality, with string writing often recalling Berg’s Lyric Suite. There were moments when the vocal line seemed to descend too low for Gerhaher’s comfort, but his soft-grained tone and lack of histrionics caught the cycle’s introspection perfectly; to hear such a fascinating rarity performed so immaculately was a special treat.
But this was a concert in which one treat followed another. As if to underline Schoeck’s musical affiliations, Notturno was followed by Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, in which Faust and her colleagues (Anna Katharina Schreiber, Danusha Waskiewicz and Jean-Guihen Queyras) were joined by violist Timothy Ridout and cellist Christian Poltéra, in a performance of passionate engagement and sometimes breathtaking expressive power.
That sextet of strings then supported Gerhaher in Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été, performed in an arrangement by David Matthews that seemed perfectly idiomatic, never contrived. Though the protagonist of the Gautier poems that Berlioz sets is undoubtedly male, and the composer made versions of the cycle for all voice types, not all the songs suit the baritone range perfectly; the opening Villanelle, for instance, loses some of its freshness and buoyancy. But the central songs, Le Spectre de la rose, Sur les lagunes and Absence, work perfectly and, the occasional odd French vowel apart, Gerhaher shaped them all marvellously.
• Repeated on 29 September, and available on BBC Sounds and streamed on demand on Wigmore Hall Live until 29 October.
