Imagine yourself as the protagonist in poet Heinrich Heine’s Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen (“I wandered among the trees”). You’ve been wandering through a forest, burdened by unrequited love. Suddenly, the birds stir in the trees, “A young woman once passed by / She sang it again and again / And we birds snatched it up / That lovely gold word.” You feel the pierce of every rounded syllable. Only then do you realize that you’ve been sitting in a concert hall with a flock very much of your kind. The voice comes not from the trees but from English tenor Ian Bostridge at Bailey Hall.
Julius Drake, a recitalist and professor at London’s Royal Academy of Music, provided stunning accompaniment to Bostridge’s singing. Drake maintains an alchemical interest in Robert Schumann and in German lieder, or art songs, both of which fuse together through the composer’s setting of Heine’s poems in the op. 24 Liederkreis (Circle of Songs). The cycle, written during Heine’s Year of Song, is dedicated to his wife, Clara. Despite its passionate origins, the Liederkreis tends to fall by the wayside of Schumann’s monumental Dichterliebe, though one can hardly deny the mastery with which piano and voice share their creative duties in both. It was spellbinding to watch Bostridge and Drake pour over twenty years of collaborative experience into Schumann’s blend of folk idioms.
To Bostridge, the sounds of words are as important as their meanings. Throughout the Liederkreis and the quartet of Dichterliebe apocrypha that preceded it he fashioned a living persona that was as chameleonic as the sentiments he so punctiliously enunciated, while Drake matched his depth gesture for gesture. Both artists found themselves surpassed only by the lyricism of Schumann, whose adorations blossomed in the passions of Lehn’ eine Wang’’ (“Rest your cheek”) and the sweetness of Berg’ und Burgen schaun herunter (“Mountains and castles look down”), the latter contrasting starkly with the morose Es treibt mich hin (“I’m driven this way, driven that”), the fiendish difficulties of which Bostridge navigated with apparent ease.
Artistic witchcraft was also in order for Mein Wagen rollet langsam (“Slowly my carriage rolls”). During the middle stanza, he sang the composer’s thought as if they were his own. Not to be outdone, Drake’s piano casts its share of enchanting spells, as in the brightness of Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage (“Every morning I awake and ask”) and the chromatic sweeps swirling like smoke from a breeze-blown candle throughout Mit Myrten und Rosen (“With Myrtle and Roses”).
While Bostridge and Drake were obviously comfortable with Schumann, many of the evening’s treasures were buried in the relatively uncharted maps of Brahms. With a life-affirming if not transformative energy Brahms’s songs made for a fitting introduction to anyone not familiar with the lieder tradition from which he is so often excluded, typically dominated as it is by Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf and Schumann himself. For one, he favored the words of “minor” poets — a downfall in an art built from the text up. This and his disinterest in grand cycles pegged him as something of an outsider. Yet Brahms saw no strong correlation between great music and great poetry. Each was its own melody. As with Schumann, whom Brahms greatly admired, folk motifs were important touchstones and sometimes led him boldly where his contemporaries dared not tread.
Often, the more careful one is, the more conservative one becomes. For Bostridge and Drake, however, care seems to have bred nothing but expressive potential. In this respect Bostridge sings as a Shakespearean actor might surrender to a soliloquy — by stepping outside the self and into the landscape of another space and time. His ego flees like the poetry from his lips, even as he shows us the vitality of the body in the singing of lieder, its centering and de-centering, its bows and cringes and in all the winged commitment required to make every syllable fly. Drake, meanwhile, proves himself supremely attuned to every color change and stands respectfully poised on the edge of drowning. He listens to the voice just as the voice listens to itself, intoning with the wavering realism of a reflective surface.
Bostridge started out as an aspiring physicist who wrote a book on witchcraft before devoting his life path to singing in 1993. Fittingly, he concludes by magically taking the audience back to the Heine, “In the magic garden wander / Two lovers, silent and alone / The nightingales are singing / The moon is shimmering,” sings the now familiar voice, no longer birdlike but still profoundly arboreal.
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