Hugo Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch, written in two bursts in the 1890s, set a total of 46 poems by Paul Heyse, translations of Italian popular songs. They are typically short - most run to no more than two pages of printed music - the words conveying sentiments of love, often in the form of absurdly extreme compliments. They're not the sort of songs which make a point. They are the point.
Performances tend to fall into two camps, one with an art-that-hides-art directness, the other more knowing and interpretatively overt in intervention. Last Thursday's complete performance by BMW Song Circle - Colette McGahon (mezzo soprano), Philip O'Reilly (bass) and John O'Conor (piano) - was of the latter variety.
John O'Conor, whose love of songs and accompanying goes back to his student days, was a forceful presence at the keyboard. It was good to hear him in that commanding form which he had so notably failed to find in Brahms's Second Piano Concerto earlier this year. But, fine as the piano playing was per se, it frequently drew attention to itself and away from the voices and the words.
Philip O'Reilly is quite simply wonderful when he chooses to address his listeners with intimacy. Music and words speak with immediacy, and his low register takes on a honeyed glow. His restraint in Sterb ich, so hullt in Blumen, with its conclusion that "dying is beautiful if it is for your sake", showed him at his most touching and effective. At the other extreme he rather tended to bark.
After a slightly frog-in-the-throat start, Colette McGahon was at her finest in the chilly opening of Wir haben beide lange Zeit geschwiegen, the lovers' frosty silence before the "peace after war". Like O'Reilly, she always sings with intelligence, although she doesn't always sufficiently resist the temptation to go coquettish, and she's taken to sliding up from under the note with alarming frequency.
That said, Wolf's Italian songs, one of the last great flowerings of the 19th-century German art-song, are not exactly everyday material in Irish concert life. It is entirely to the credit of BMW Song Circle to have presented the cycle in such clearly committed and caring performances.
