If some singers are poets, lavishing attention on every nuance of phrasing, intonation, and the synesthetic cohesion of music and words, others are novelists, story tellers, surveyors of the wide terrain. German baritone Christian Gerhaher stood squarely in the latter category on Tuesday, in a propulsive, probing and somewhat hard-edged recital of Schubert and Wolfgang Rihm at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church.
The singer’s powerful narrative engine churned through Schubert’s dramatic, high-contrast accounts of Prometheus, Ganymede, and Chronos. “Winter journey through the Harz mountains” by Rihm, a contemporary German composer born in 1952, offered an extended visceral experience of “heavy morning clouds,” “eerie thickets,” and other metaphorical realms of ‘the marvelling world.” Even in the more concise selections, Gerhaher dug deeply into loneliness and longing and the philosophical paradox, posed in Rihm’s “Parabasis,” that “the great is little, the little is great.”
The results were often bracing and exciting, stripped of any demonstrative theatrics. Focus and impact, more than beauty or musical scene-painting, were the defining principles in this program of somgs set to Goethe’s often intense texts, keenly translated by Richard Stokes. Gerhaher, who closed his eyes now and then and registered emotion with a clenched jaw or a creased forehead, barely moved from a spot at the piano’s inner curve. His right hand lightly clung to the instrument’s edge throughout.
Gerhaher’s firm, supple, and multi-hued voice knew no boundaries ... He was ironic and wrathful, pointed and wry, as distant as the moon, and close as a lover’s fevered embrace ... This was high-octane singing.
Gerhaher’s firm, supple, and multi-hued voice knew no boundaries, ranging from potent fortissimos to a kind of dry direct address bordering on sprechstimme, from grief-struck to terrifying, haughty to terrified. He was ironic and wrathful, pointed and wry, as distant as the moon, and close as a lover’s fevered embrace. He broke lines into tightly furled phrases and summoned up long open vowels. He commanded the listener’s attention but almost never carressed or charmed. This was high-octane singing that could have used the occasional lighter touch, especially in a post-intermission portion given over to longer pieces.
Photo by Michael Strickland
The program replaced a previously announced bill of Beethoven, Schöenberg, Haydn, and Berg. According to a spokesperson for San Francisco Performances, which opened its 35th season with this San Francisco debut, illness curtailed the singer’s rehearsal time. The Goethe program, which Gerhaher and accompanist Gerold Huber performed recently at the Salzburg Festival, was slotted in as a replacement.
Few in the appreciative St. Mark’s Lutheran crowd could have felt they were short-changed. Gerhaher opened with a set of eight Schubert songs that revealed the singer’s range and warmly confiding tone. “To the moon” had a lambent glow. “Secret,” over Huber’s sly two-beat keyboard figure, was aptly understated. The inner drive in “Restless love” felt almost frankly sexual. The repeated “Schlafe” in “Night song” grew steadily more hypnotic.
The six angularly expressive Rihm Goethe-Lieder that followed were delivered with rigor, conviction, and resourcefulness. The eccentric phrasing and bolts of lyricism in an extract from “Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years” were particularly striking.
Schubert’s three “Harper’s Songs” offered another kind of exploration — quieter and more inward. In “Who gives himself to loneliness,” spun out over Huber’s liquid arpeggios, Gerhaher rowed the listener steadily from a lover’s angst to his longing for death. In “I’ll steal from door to door,” the singer evoked a kind of self-effacement in short, aching phrases. Four longish Schubert songs, Rihm’s mono-drama-like “Journey” and Schubert’s “Greeting and Farewell” comprised the second half of this asymmetrical evening. Gerhaher’s intensity level never flagged, most notably in the Rihm, with its vaulting intervals, quizzical mutterings and furious outbursts. It was a marvel, if slightly steely one in all its carefully deployed effects.
A hushed encore of Schubert’s “Wandrers Nachtlied II,” sung in what seemed a single, mesmerizing breath, served as a lullaby-like closer.