In a recital by tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake devoted entirely to Schubert songs, it was, strangely, the piano that shone. Not strange, of course, that the piano was a vital part of the performance of the songs: Schubert's accompaniments, after all, are full partners, sometimes offering comment, or warning or sympathizing with the protagonist, along the lines of a Greek chorus, or even at times revealing things the protagonist is unaware of.
And Drake is an excellent pianist. Through his use of color and drama, time and again he provided the passion, delicacy, subtlety, characterization, and all the other elements that go into making Schubert songs the marvels that they are. What was strange was that the singer seemed to see his role not as that of cointerpreter but rather as explicator of the text.
Bostridge made his preference for doing this clear by relying for effect solely on his vocal abilities — his soft singing, his dynamic range, his energetic enunciation of the text — as well as on the communication of his thorough understanding of the poems. He lacked the ability (or the desire) to give himself fully to the music of the songs, which the pianist did completely. The balance between the two performers was therefore upset. The pianist played as if he were singing the songs; the singer, however, only played the words.
Things started out well enough in this San Francisco Performances program with the exquisite Im Frühling (In spring). Bostridge's delicate pianissimo singing and Drake's soft piano dynamic matched perfectly. But even here it was Drake, and not Bostridge, who conveyed the sense of longing and the hint of sadness that are so much a part of the fragrance of the song.
This limitation of the singer was never more in evidence than in the performance of the powerful Totengräbers Heimweh (Gravedigger's homesickness). The song starts muscularly; the man digs grave after grave with no rest. In a section performed affectingly by both artists in a bitter, stark unison, he begins to long for the coolness and peace of his own grave. Near the end of the song a startling transition occurs when the gravedigger foresees his death with increasing ecstasy as he looks toward "home" and the loved ones who will greet him after he dies.
The pianist managed to convey the utter unearthliness of the final passage by making the piano sound like the ghost of the instrument it had been, seemingly dying out at the very end in an amazing decrescendo, as the man appears to die before our eyes.
But Bostridge could not or would not accept the pianistic fabric laid down for him. He projected no yearning for release from life's pain. There was no hint in his singing of the character's quiet but intense rapture on passing from life to death. Instead, the singer's tone was anything but otherworldly, being several shades too robust, and the magical effect that might have occurred was lost.