ÜBERWÄLTIGEND!

 Ammiel Bushakevitz and Konstantin Krimmel

(Photo by Joseph Sinnott)

We have just spent a week with two extraordinary artists, leaving us almost lost in a world of German Romanticism,--not everyone's cup of tea but very much the beverage of choice of the lieder lovers who packed Butenweiser Hall at The 92nd Street Y. Mastering the three song cycles of Franz Schubert (and yes, they were mastered) and performing them all in one week must have made enormous demands on the artists; giving undivided attention makes a demand on the usually restless New York audience as well. One only heard the quiet rustling of the pages of the translation booklet.

For our part, we neither followed along the translation nor did we take notes. This exception to our usual concert reviewing led to our complete immersion in the experience, as contrasted with the very first time we heard these Schubert song cycles in the same venue sung by a very famous baritone. At that time we were new to lieder and had to read the translation. It was a fine starter for us,  and can be considered responsible for initiating a lifetime of interest in art song and a wish to learn German. We have come a long way!

Although primarily focused on the subtleties of interpretation, the refinements of technique in both baritone Konstantin Krimmel and collaborative pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz were not lost on us. Herr Krimmel can tell a story with such variety of vocal coloration, subtlety of phrasing, and depth of feeling that one can focus on the storytelling with the means of achievement only affecting us on a subtle level. With even a minimal knowledge of German one knew exactly the nature of the story he was telling. Bushakevitz evinced such total command of his instrument  that the accompaniment revealed the setting as well as the unconscious feelings of the poet narrator.

Our favorite of the three evenings was the darkest-- Winterreise. We call this "50 Shades of Black". It is the chronicle of a man's descent into madness after a romantic rejection. Perhaps the poet Wilhelm Müller meant the work to be taken a bit ironically but Schubert put his pen to paper with emotional intensity and psychological validity. In perfect Schubertian partnership, piano and vocal line augment each other. In the same fashion, Krimmel and Bushakevitz complemented each other in limning both the natural elements of a countryside winter and the mental decompensation of the hero.

So, we view the cycle as a matchless work of art involving poet, composer, singer and pianist. We members of the audience can in no way feel detached but we take this journey together. If we do not feel shaken to the core as "Die Leiermann" fades to a close, then the artists have not succeeded. This perfect partnership had the hero depersonalizing and derealizing in succession, hallucinating the two suns, shivering in the cold, fantasizing that crows and signposts were to be taken personally. There are only a few bars of momentary and false hopes, one when the piano gives us the hoofbeats of the horse drawing the postal coach which just might contain a letter from the lost beloved--but doesn't. And once again when the hero awakens from a sweet dream; but depression rapidly overtakes him as Schubert switches readily from major to minor, as he so often does. One cannot believe how artistry can create so many versions of despair. Fifty shades of black indeed!!

Our second favorite was Die schöne Müllerin which tells a somewhat different story but one no less tragic. The arc of the story follows our young hero who sets out to make his place in the world, finds a job with a miller, falls in love with the miller's daughter, mistakes her interest, despairs over her fickleness, and intends to drown himself in the same brook that powers the millwheel. The story offers the singer a wider latitude of emotional expression from gaiety to misery and offers the pianist an opportunity to limn rushing water and turning mill wheels. Schubert was a master at creating imagery by means of melody and rhythm and our pair of artists picked up on every subtlety with consummate technique and intense emotionality.

The final evening was Schwanengesang which was not published until after Schubert's tragic early death. This work is filled with variety but doesn't tell a story. Several songs stood out, probably because we have heard them so often in concert. Ludwig Rellstab's "Liebesbotschaft" and "Abschied" begin the collection on a rather cheerful note and his famous "Ständchen" touches our heart with its tender importuning.. After some rather sad songs, Johann Gabriel Seidl's "Die Taubenpost" lifts our spirits with its cheerful message and lilting rhythm. Heinrich Heine contributed two seaside texts of contrasting mood, the cheerful "Das Fischermädchen" and the painful "Am Meer". The final two songs are also settings of Heine and they are songs of torment with "Der Doppelgänger" expressing the torment of lost love and "Der Atlas" expressing the torment of the futility of existence.

Rather than letting the audience leave in a state of depression, our generous artists offered the soothing balm of a Ralph Vaughn Williams song that was lovely but seemed trivial after the depths attained in the cycle. We cannot leave you Dear Reader without reiterating our deeply held belief that one of the major failures of  contemporary art song is the use of boring contemporary text that neither rhymes nor scans. Hearing three evenings of crispy enunciated German that does rhyme and scan left us feeling fulfilled. We would prefer to feel sadly fulfilled by music that still haunts us days later than to hear something contemporary that we will forget within an hour. Schubert's melodies are repeating over and over in our mind's ear and we are even cherishing the sorrow we felt for the unhappy protagonists. We live in the Age of Cool and how refreshing and meaningful it is to recognize that sorrow is part of a deeply felt life.

We will not close without mentioning something that puzzled us in  Die Schöne Müllerin, mainly because we had never before heard embellishments of the vocal line, and we have heard this cycle more times than we can count, sung by both famous artists and by students. We were obliged to consult with a couple pianist friends of ours who informed us that it is not incorrect. We don't care whether it is "correct". It was just something unexpected that we will have to hear again before we decide whether we like it or not.

In any case, we feel so grateful to have spent a week with two artists engaged in legitimate artistic exploration without grandstanding. This is a week we will not soon forget!

© meche kroop

A NOVEL TAKE ON SCHUBERT'S WINTERREISE

Lech Napierała and Tomasz Konieczny at the Kosciuszko Foundation

Guest Review by Cullen Gandy.

Cullen Gandy is a former opera singer, based out of New York City, who writes about issues relating to the performing arts in America. You can see more at his blog www.arsravingmad.com which we recommend highly.

The building that houses the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City, now 101 years old, was the beautiful stage for an interesting new adaptation of Schubert’s famous Winterreise (Winter’s Journey). Music for the evening was provided by two considerable talents, in bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny and pianist Lech Napierała.

This recital featured an interesting twist on an established classical favorite; melding the haunting Schubertian harmony and melody of the inimitable song cycle, with the poetry of Polish writer Stanislaw Baranczak. A Harvard lecturer, and esteemed translator of many great works of fiction from English into Polish, Baranczak became enamored with Winterreise, and he determined to emboss it with poems that represent his own artistic experiences/ideas. This wasn’t simply some half-hearted attempt to jigsaw someone’s favorite poems into music they thought was appropriate. It was a deliberate endeavor, by a motivated artist, to imbue new meaning into the great works of the past. More of a posthumous collaboration than a ‘remix’.

But did it work?

As a preface, I should say that I spent a great deal of my graduate and post-graduate studies writing on, and singing, Winterreise (specifically the musical idioms Schubert used to represent text). It merits pointing out that Müller, the original lyric poet who wrote the text for Winterreise, published his work in 1822 and 1824, and Schubert set that text to music three years later. This is important to remember, because it means that the music was created with the words in mind, and not the other way around. The text initially informed the music, and, for the original iteration of the song cycle, they told a story in parallel.

In the original Winterreise, there are certain musical idioms that harken back and allude to ideas, words, emotions, and events that the wanderer has throughout the work. Though the songs, in a sense, can be seen as events or snapshots of the journeyman’s fateful voyage, they are thematically connected. The traveller walks, he leaves a note on the gate, he sees the wind playing with the weathervane, he sees a tree under which he used to sit, he sees a crow flying along with him, etc. All of these things are happening to him in real-time. As a result, no part of the textual story is exempted from Schubert’s influence. Rhythm, harmony, melody, silence, tempo, and macro-harmonic structure are all anchored to the wanderer’s experience of the journey. They transfigure the text, and serve as the setting of the story.

Though Baranczak’s poetry is often quite thoughtful and artful, his poems are disparate from the musical scheme over which they have been laid. As a result, the songs become more like individual vignettes, or one-off thoughts that occur to the poet as he is going through life. A journey of a certain sort, to be sure, but not one as coherent as that of the physical and emotional experience of Müller’s wanderer.

Müller was no Goethe or Rilke, and his poetic strengths lay with the ease of his meter and imagery. Though Baranczak mirrors much of Müller’s formal constraints, along with a certain German gloom, his poetry is often high-minded and political at times. There’s something avant-garde about it; treatises about the worse nature of humanity dialing in to hear about catastrophes, alongside the sports and weather news. It’s not the same kind of lyric poetry, and, to be fair, I don’t think it was supposed to be. But there was more than a little bit of cognitive dissonance on my part; hearing a continuous story in the music, and seeing an array of smaller stories in the room.

But it’s not important to talk about what this work is supposed to be, let’s simply take it for what it is.

This work is a fine artistic effort to breathe new life into a cherished medium. Polish is a lovely language in which to have this music set, and it shares much of the depth of character that German affords sung poetry. Baranczak’s poems, while not uniformly well-woven into the vocal line, were generally unobtrusive, and often quite complimentary. That just means the right kind of vowels went where they were supposed to go. I was prepared to be skeptical, or bored, but was quite entertained. There were deviations, too, in tempo and musical interpretation; many that enlivened the senses, and a few that didn’t hit the right mark for me.

The evening’s vocal offering by Mr. Konieczny (who can currently be heard at a number of productions at the Met) was as ambitious and thoughtful as the piece itself. His is a noble tone; befitting of his usual Wagnerian repertoire. The singing was vivid and full of color, only occasionally veering off of the breath in one or two of the higher, softer passages. The majority of the cycle was marked by his pleasing and even singing, even down through the very lowest notes. He sang over a stand of music, but was only lightly tethered to it, and he afforded a rich, interpretive, sometimes declamatory understanding of the text; in every phrase and line. He acted the words so effectively, that I came out of the room thinking that I understood Polish. Alas, I do not.

Mr. Napierała played the music exquisitely. Each touch felt as though it was choreographed instead of it being played. His interpretation had an extemporaneous feel to it; as though it were something totally new.

Together, the two of them seemed almost telepathically connected. Each song was marked by crisp rests, dynamic changes, fluctuations and continuities in tempo; catching the audience off guard again and again. Between them, there was a laser precision to each musical consideration in each song. It was really exciting to hear.

From an artistic perspective, this setting is worthy for the examination of more audiences to come.

(c) meche kroop