Lines of Light: Schubert and Kurtág (Alpha Classics) initially seems like a bundle of contradictions. The centerpiece of this recording by baritone Benjamin Appl is the latest version of György Kurtág’s Hölderlin-Gesänge, Op. 35a, performed under the composer’s artistic direction. These aphoristic settings of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) repeatedly focus on death and finality. It’s hard to find much light amid the gloom.
Yet in an album that integrates these and other songs by Kurtág with seven by Franz Schubert that were beloved by Kurtág’s late wife, Márta, despair somehow morphs into a celebration of love, friendship, and the undimmable power of creativity. Key to that transformation is the inherent affirmation of Appl’s extremely handsome and warm voice — a voice that affirms life even as it sings of death.
The opening and closing tracks of the album clarify its creators’ intent. The starter, Kurtág’s “Circumdederunt … ” is a stand-alone creation that is not part of the Hölderlin cycle. Based on two biblical psalms, it’s a desperate call to the Lord as death encroaches. At first, the music sounds like ordinary medieval plainchant; then, in the middle of this holy atmosphere, Appl suddenly adopts a sickly tone that gives everything a far different meaning. Thanks to his masterful interpretation, the shift is startling.
After being thrown off balance, we are treated to a most unusual yet carefully programmed mix. First, we shift back two centuries to Schubert’s “Ganymed,” in which the rapture of love and the longing for embrace lead to ecstatic transcendence. From there, to Kurtág’s “Das Angenehme dieser Welt” (The pleasant things of this world), which ends with the devastating words “Ich bin nichts mehr, / Ich lebe nicht mehr gerne” (I am nothing anymore, / no longer glad to be alive).
As Lines of Light’s journey unfolds, Schubert’s melodic romances create a near-perfect balance with Kurtág’s riveting truths about death and finality. The Hungarian composer’s setting of Paul Celan’s poetry is devastating, and his songs to poems by Ulrike Schuster are bitter, emphatic, violent, and reeking of decay. Kurtág and Appl remain unflinching through this stern material.
Twenty tracks after the album begins, the recital ends with Brahms’s delightfully melodic, irresistibly sweet “Sonntag,” in which a smitten lad wishes to God that he were with his “thousand-times beautiful sweetheart.” At first, the choice of closer may seem a bit puzzling. Then you realize that the lad is Kurtág and the song an ultimate prayer to join his beloved.
No less a pianist than Pierre-Laurent Aimard thoughtfully accompanies Appl in Kurtág’s four settings of Schuster’s poems. James Baillieu plays piano on many others tracks — some are unaccompanied — and Csaba Bencze and Gergely Lukács add trombone and tuba to one of the Hölderlin lieder. Sonics are excellent, and the music everywhere compelling.
Curiously, Kurtág chose not to accompany his own songs but rather the two final songs on the album, “Sonntag” and Schubert’s “Der Jüngling an der Quelle” (The youth by the spring). Both are performed quite slowly, either by design or the dictates of age.
For music lovers willing to take in joy and sorrow in equal measure, Lines of Light offers multiple treasures. As the great authority on death and dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, discovered after studying drawings of chrysalises transforming into butterflies on the walls of concentration camp barracks, even in the deepest darkness, there is light.