Dichterliebe - Schumann
Eichendorff songs - Wolf
The much-lauded young British tenor Ian Bostridge made his Irish debut in Belfast last year and gave his first Dublin recital in the National Gallery at the AIB Music Festival in Great Irish Houses on Saturday.
It may be that the reputation which preceded him led to exaggerated expectations, but the National Gallery programme of Schumann and Wolf was oddly unsettling. Could it be that Bostridge and his pianist, Julius Drake, failed to fathom the gallery's acoustic? The tendency throughout the evening was for the light tenor voice to get lost in the often forwardly-projected piano playing; people sitting in other parts of the hall - I was seated near the front - reported similar experiences.
The loss was dual, of words and of line. As a result, those words of the text which were singled out for special emphasis (and they were many), tended to stand out too starkly from their surroundings, and the connectivity of the vocal line was often compromised. It's not often I've heard a performance of Dichterliebe where so much probing thought and musical manipulation have been engaged in, to so little ultimate expressive effect. Julius Drake's piano-playing set a new high-water mark for individuality in my experience of this cycle, moving at times beyond the role of support or partnership to a level of assertiveness that was frankly distracting. Wolf's Eichendorff settings weathered the ear-wagging mannerisms and preciousness of the duo's style rather better. To be sure, there were moments, mostly when the performers essayed a manner of plainer intimacy, when words and music matched and prospered. In such passages Bostridge has a beauty of voice that is well worth getting acquainted with. And the lively intelligence of his approach is at all times obvious. On this occasion, however, neither the dark emotions of Schumann nor, to borrow Eric Sams's description, Wolf's "portrait-gallery of sailors, students and minstrels, gypsy girls and forest sprites" were illuminated with success.
