Fourteen years ago, the baritone Florian Boesch released a disc devoted to Schumann’s settings of the poet Heinrich Heine. It included the nine songs of the Op 24 Liederkreis, but omitted the best known of all Schumann’s cycles, the 16 songs to Heine texts that make up his Dichterliebe. Partnered as before by the ever meticulous Malcolm Martineau, Boesch has now remedied that omission with a new recording of that pinnacle of the German lied tradition.
It’s a typically considered performance, in which Boesch’s stealthy, velvety tone and unfailing attention to words are used to superb effect. Whether darkening his timbre for the seventh number, Ich Grolle Nicht, or hollowing it out for the funereal lament of the 13th, Ich Hab’ im Traum Geweinet, he finds the perfect sound world to match up the expressive weight of each song.
Just occasionally he overdoes things, whether by choosing a tempo that seems fractionally too slow for the meaning of the music or the text, or by modulating his tone a bit too intensely, so that the song acquires a kind of gothic creepiness. By and large, though, this is as fine a recorded performance of Dichterliebe as any released in recent years.
Alongside it is Boesch’s performance of the Kerner Lieder, the settings of poems by Justinus Kerner that were the first product of 1840, the year in which Schumann celebrated his marriage to Clara Wieck in an outpouring of song. It is not a song cycle as such; there’s no real narrative thread binding the 12 numbers together, though Boesch orders them, he says, in a way that “allows you to follow both a dramatic and emotional progression”. He certainly makes his sequence dramatically convincing, and while only a few of the Kerner settings can match the sheer intensity and lyrical power of Dichterliebe – admittedly a very high bar indeed – Boesch’s performance is a reminder that they should be heard in recitals far more often than they are.
This week’s other pick
The five discs of Schumann songs that the German tenor Peter Schreier recorded with the pianist Norman Shetler in the early 1970s have now been rereleased as a single collection by Berlin Classics. They should be compulsory listening for anyone at all interested in lieder singing at its most communicative, for with his immaculate diction and the precise colour and weight he gave to each phrase, Schreier was a supreme artist, whose concern for every detail of what he sang was exemplary. The set includes Dichterliebe, as well as both the Op 24 and Op 39 Liederkreis and the Kerner Lieder, though only some of the other great collection, Myrthen, is included, scattered through groups of less familiar songs. But it is all an unmitigated joy.
