Baritone Christian Gerhaher’s two recitals with his regular pianist Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall this week are devoted to Schumann. Not the most familiar Schumann songs, though the second programme does include the settings of poems by Eichendorff that make up the Op 39 Liederkreis, but a number of the other 40-odd collections of songs that Schumann completed between 1840 and 1852.
All of these groups are, Gerhaher insisted in the programme notes he had written for the first recital, song cycles, in which the individual settings are linked by a narrative thread, a common theme, or what he calls “a symmetrical concept with the poetry of ideas”. It’s a repertoire in which Gerhaher is unmatched today, and, as he showed, he has explored all these songs in minute musical and psychological detail, so that his absorption into the particular world of each is complete. His voice may no longer have the velvety sheen one remembers, but it is still a wonderfully flexible instrument, which he uses with acute intelligence, whether delineating the narrative of a miniaturised drama, or colouring every syllable of an achingly expressive declaration of love or loss.
The centre of gravity among the six opus numbers in the first programme was provided by the Kerner Lieder Op 35, settings of the poems of Justinus Kerner, which Gerhaher likens to Schubert’s Winterreise, though Schumann’s protagonist dies, while Schubert’s only “flirts with death”. Musically, though, its Schubertian links often seem to be closer to Schwanengesang than Winterreise, though in a song such as Stirb, Lieb und Freud (Die, Love and Joy) Gerhaher made the tragedy all too real. But it was the unexpected treasures that Gerhaher and Huber pointed up so skilfully in the lesser known sets, such as the exquisite hymn-like version of Goethe’s Nachtlied that is the first of the four songs of Op 96, that made the recital so compelling.
It was a regular reminder that even a decade after 1840, his miraculous “year of song”, Schumann was still composing settings of ravishing, intense beauty.
• Christian Gerhaher’s second all-Schumann recital is at the Wigmore Hall on 19 December.
