Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)
Italienisches Liederbuch (1890-96)
Carolyn Sampson (soprano)
Allan Clayton (tenor)
Joseph Middleton (piano)
rec. 2020/21, Potton Hall, Saxmundham, UK
Texts and translations provided
BIS BIS-2553 SACD [79]
I first began listening to this disc on a freezing winter’s evening as a wild storm battered the windows of my Scottish home. It’d be going a bit far to say that the music transported me to the warmth and sunshine of Mediterranean Italy, but it certainly distracted me from the northern cold for a while.
Hugo Wolf is one of the very greatest songsmiths in the German Lieder tradition. If he is only rarely mentioned in the same breath as Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, then that’s probably because he wrote so little else, and also because so many of his songs are so short and (seemingly) unassuming. The Italienisches Liederbuch (Italian Songbook) exemplifies much of this, but it also demonstrates that there’s a lot more to Wolf’s reputation than the popular implication.
The songs are, indeed, mostly very brief. This release fits 46 songs onto one disc: many are less than a minute in length, and the longest track on the disc is just shy of four minutes in duration. That doesn’t make them inconsequential, however; far from it. Each of the poems are highly condensed explorations of some aspect of love, be it sincere, comic, tragic, flirtatious, careless, or something else. Each is a little world of its own, and Wolf’s music elevates them into something altogether more engaging than the words operating alone would suggest.
They’re individually precious, therefore, and as a set all but priceless. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that they should all be consumed in one sitting. One of the problems of the collection – probably a more accurate word than a “cycle”, as there is no story or musical linkage between the songs – is that listening to a lot of it at once can be like consuming too much dessert wine in one sitting, or pigging out on delicious chocolate truffles that should be spaced out to be appreciated. Only once have I experienced the whole set in performance, and it didn’t really work, partly due to oversaturation (review).
There are delights withing the collection, however, so a CD is quite the best way to experience it in the comfort of home and with a duration of your choosing. This recording of it is a treat, featuring three excellent artists who understand the songs perfectly and know very well how to bring them to life.
Carolyn Sampson’s soprano is rich and fulsome, yet she controls and shades it to make a different sound to accommodate many different moods. She is often given songs that suggest flirtation and coquettishness, but with an ambiguous undertone that suggests there is more going on below the surface. That’s particularly the case in Book II, where she has a remarkable trilogy of songs (tracks 24-26) each of which play with deep seriousness and mock playfulness. She is very good at capturing that ambiguity, whether it’s deployed towards humour, insouciance or sincerity. Even the ostensibly simple tragedy of Was soll der Zorn, mein Schatz doesn’t sound as though it should be taken completely seriously, and elsewhere she can shade her voice down to suggest delicacy and lightness, even a slightly fragile sound in opening songs.
Even finer, however, is Allan Clayton’s tenor, which seems to go even deeper than Sampson’s in both his interpretative insights and the sheer beauty of his singing, so marvellously expressive is his voice. The sheer variety of what’s on offer is remarkable. He sounds focused and contemplative in Der Mond hat eine schwere Klag’, quietly ardent in Daß doch gemalt all deine Reize wären, touched with romantic frenzy in Hoffärtig seid Ihr, schönes Kind, rhapsodically beautiful in Und willst du deinen Liebsten sterben sehen. Elsewhere there is spiritual, quasiy-religious intensity in Wir haben beide lange Zeit geschweigen, playfulness in Ein Ständchen Euch zu bringen kam ich her, remarkably beauty in the death-wish of Sterb’ ich, so hüllt in Blumen meine Glieder, where the voice never rises above pianissimo, and there is hymn-like transcendence in Benedeit der sel’ge Mutter.
I could go on, but the list above demonstrates just how great a variety Clayton manages to demonstrate, and he’s a treat to listen to. Alongside both singers, Joseph Middleton’s piano playing anchors the whole recital. It’s extraordinarily impressive how he manages to inhabit every mood and tone picture so effectively. There is ecclesiastical bell-tolling in the songs that reference the divine, flirtatious semiquavers in Du denkst mit einem Fädchen mich zu fangen, military fanfares for Ihr jungen Leute, die ihr zieht ins Feld, and rapt chorale-like adoration for Benedeit der sel’ge Mutter, to name just a few examples.
If there’s a criticism then it’s that the two singers seem to inhabit different aural universes. There is never a sense of them working as a pair, nor even of them standing alongside one another in the same room, and that’s noticeable to the ear even before you realise that the soprano and tenor songs were recorded in completely different sessions ten months apart. Often there can be a sense of an aural lurch going from one to the other, though that’s as much Wolf’s fault as that of the recording engineers: the two vocal lines exist all but independently of each other, so it seems churlish to criticise this team for doing what pretty much every recording of the Italienisches Liederbuch does. Overall the recorded sound is very good, and it gives the voices and piano a good sense of air in which they can breathe.
The other recordings of the Italienisches Liederbuch that I know well both feature a baritone instead of a tenor, which might help to explain why I was so taken with Clayton’s contribution to this one. They’re the versions featuring Dawn Upshaw and Olaf Bär, on EMI/Warner from 1995, and from Mojca Erdmann and Christian Gerhaher, on RCA from 2009. Both are very fine, and there is no shortage of other interpretations featuring the greats of their own age, such as Schwarzkopf/Fischer-Dieskau or Ameling/Krause. However, if you want a tenor in this repertoire then you’d struggle to hear finer than what’s available here. Take your time with it, though: pour yourself a long drink, settle down in your most comfortable chair, and let Wolf’s 46 musical masterpieces transport you one-by-one to somewhere entirely different.
Simon Thompson
Previous review: Göran Forsling (August 2022)
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