American soprano Erin Morley and British baritone Huw Montague Rendall, great artists both, were last heard together in the UK as Norina and Malatesta respectively in Glyndebourne’s 2022 revival of Donizetti’s brittle often bitter comedy Don Pasquale. At this beautiful Wigmore Hall concert, together with pianist Malcolm Martineau, they took us into very different territory, however, with Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch, his last completed song collection, a sequence of brief vignettes (“little things”, they are called in the opening song) that gradually coalesces into one of music’s great disquisitions on the nature of love.
Unlike some interpreters, who fashion tales and dramas from the collection by reordering and restructuring it, they simply gave us the songs in the published order – still the best approach to the work, which ultimately dispenses with narrative and forges coherence and unity from juxtapositions of music by turns ecstatic, erotic, spiritual, funny and profoundly sad. The contrast, meanwhile between Morley’s bright soprano and Montague Rendall’s silky-smooth baritone served as a reminder that the two singers effectively inhabit different emotional territory. She is often worldly, knowing, ironic, while he can be idealistic, dreamy, at times obsessive. All this gives the Liederbuch its own internal sense of drama.
Both singers were on fine, wonderfully expressive form here. Morley, with a glorious blaze in her tone, sounded exquisite in Auch kleine Dinge at the start, was tellingly poised between tenderness and mockery in Wie lange schon, and reeled off her catalogue of lovers with gleeful abandon in the final Ich hab’ in Penna einen Liebsten.
Montague Rendall, meanwhile, was all intense introspection and passionate restraint. Sterb’ ich so hüllt in Blumen, with its hovering vocal line and shifting but narrow dynamic range, was marvellous in its control. Benedeit die sel’ge Mutter, meanwhile, passed from rapt contemplation to near insanity, a poignant reminder, perhaps of Wolf’s own mental collapse shortly after completing his Liederbuch. So much happens in the piano in this music, too, and Martineau probed every figuration and emotional shift with great finesse. The only encore – and the evening’s only actual duet – was Bei Männern from Mozart Die Zauberflöte, done with great beauty and infinite charm.
