Customer Reviews

Schubert: Schwanengesang,D.957 / Brahms: 4 Last Songs,Op.121

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Thomas Quasthoff/Justus Zeyen - Schubert, "Schwanengesang" Brahms "Vier Ernste Gesaenge"

"To sing like that just once - and then ..............." wrote Maxim Gorky after hearing Chaliapin - and there really are moments on this recording which make one understand exactly what he meant. There is a definitive quality about the singing, which persuades you that Quasthoff's way with these songs is the only one, and his accompanist is in all aspects his equal, with a poetic yet muscular style which ideally complements this most individual of voices, with its noble, burnished tone and its sense of powerful ease.

This combination of works is unique on disc, surprisingly since it is a very logical one; both are late works, both represent the composer's valediction to the genre, and both are ideally suited to the baritone voice. There has been much discussion of late as to whether or not "Schwanengesang" ought to be performed as though it were a "cycle," or as two or even three separate sets of songs. The latter approach was taken in the Hyperion edition, not entirely successfully, but Quasthoff brushes aside these considerations; such is the magnetic power of his singing that one rarely imagines that these songs could be performed in any other way.

All of Quasthoff's great qualities are apparent in the Rellstab settings - superb legato line, natural inflexion of words and that uniquely beautiful tone with its embracing warmth and sweet tremulousness. These interpretations easily stand comparison with the best, and it is a matter of taste as to whether or not you prefer, say, John Mark Ainsley's bright, youthful tone and ardent manner to Quasthoff's aching yet understated passion. For me, Ainsley has the edge in "Liebesbotschaft" and "Staendchen" - in the latter, the tenor is simply perfection; at "Liebchen, komm' zu mir!" you can, as Graham Johnson puts it, almost feel the singer's tenderness, and at "Komm, begluecke mich!" you sense the lover's forlorn mood. Quasthoff also sings this beautifully, but he lacks Ainsley's tender ardour - he is rather fierce at moments, sounding almost threatening rather than pleading.

The Heine and Seidl settings are another matter; here, Quasthoff is in his element, and it would be difficult to find a more ideal interpretation of songs such as "Ihr Bild" and "Am Meer." "Das Fischermaedchen" is beguilingly seductive in a way totally lacking in Anthony Rolfe Johnson's version, and "Die Taubenpost" is one of the finest pieces of Schubert singing I have ever heard. Where Rolfe Johnson annoys with his reedy tone and approximate German, Quasthoff enchants and moves with his exquisite modulation and colouring, especially at the song's close, where he makes you gasp at the way he handles the little appoggiatura lean on "Sehnsucht" and his just-enough pressure on "treuen."

The Brahms set is equally fine; Quasthoff's singing and Zeyen's playing are both magisterial from start to finish. This singer seems to have a special affinity for the music of Brahms, and together with his marvellous pianist, always sensitive and consistently virtuosic in the best possible sense, he convinces the listener that these songs are among the greatest in the genre. Their darkness and almost obsessive quality make them perfect for this voice, and Quasthoff interprets them in wonderfully fervent tones.

Rather than externalising the dramas of both "cycles," this singer conveys their individual moods and feelings not by pointing at himself and saying,"Look at me! See how I suffered," seeming instead to point at us, and say," Look at you!" His singing unites emotional poetic grace with muscular reason, and this major recording is one which will be indispensable for all who love this sublime music.

All of this music is familiar territory for Thomas Quasthoff, so it is not surprising that he conveys a consistency of mood and character. He is not afraid to color his voice in the Schubert and have some restraint in the Brahms, but both are sung in good taste. The recording is warm and captures Quasthoff's voice superbly. There are many voices that will do justice to this music, but Quasthoff knows just how to make his voice meet the demands of these works.

I never thought I would hear anything like Thomas Quasthoff's performances on this CD. His plain, unaffected, yet technically masterful singing is more than "revelatory." It transmits the emotional impact of the songs very powerfully and with a directness I have never heard from any other singer, whether lieder specialist or not.
Quasthoff, I think, is leading the way as a singer and artist. All singers will be grateful to him, as will the public, for exposing us to lieder which is heart felt, rather than just a mass of calculations. He is indeed a master.

Thomas Quasthoff's triumphant life, despite unimaginable adversities, surely qualifies him for interpreting the "Four Earnest Songs" of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) with more emotional authenticity than any other baritone I can think of. That wouldn't be enough, of course, if Quasthoff didn't also have a superb 'instrument' - his voice - and equally superb vocal technique. To my ears, the Lieder of Brahms and Schubert are Quasthoff's natural repertoire; I don't enjoy his Bach or his Mahler nearly as much; he lacks the agility for the former and the 'sprezzatura' for the latter. His recordings of Schubert's "Winterreise' and "Schöne Müllerin" -- the latter also accompanied by pianist Justus Zeyen -- have been justly acclaimed and are among my favorites in the genre. This performance, of songs written in the last years of the lives of Brahms and Franz Schubert (1797-1828), moves me deeply. I offer it as my choice for Quasthoff's finest recording.

The fourteen songs conventionally grouped as a cycle and given the title "Schwanengesang" - Swansong - are settings of seven poems by Ludwig Rellstab, six poems by Heinrich Heine, and one anomalously cheerful poem by Johann Seidl. It's only a musicologist's guess that Schubert would have assembled these 14 Lieder into precisely such a cycle; the title "Schwanengesang" was the invention of the publishers of the posthumous first edition. Honestly, I don't think the cycle is well-assembled as such; the seven Rellstab songs make a grand cycle all by themselves, a cycle with potently cogent affect as well as musical unity, while the Heine songs, lovely and delicate as they are, seem clearer and more poignant by themselves. The final Lied, the amourous "Taubenpost", plainly belongs in different company. The Rellstab poems are indeed elegiac -- texts of resignation and 'departure', truly akin to the fabled song of the dying swan -- and Schubert never wrote anything more magnificently sorrowful. As Thomas Quasthoff says about all the songs on this CD: "Here the colors are crucial; they must be dark, severe, somber." But if the Rellstab colors are deeply dark, the Heine songs, like all of Heine's poetry, are of a pastel darkness streaked with nacreous irony.

Brahms apparently composed his Opus 121 "Vier Ernste Gesänge" in 1896, in response to the deaths of several lifelong friends, and in anticipation of the death of Clara Schumann, who had suffered a dreadful stroke. The four Biblical texts, however, are hardly consolatory. The first three are exclamation of despair, scarcely compatible with any Christian hopes of resurrection and eternal bliss. [It seems possible that the fourth song had been composed sometime earlier in Brahms's work-life. The music is utterly fitting in this group, but the text seems oddly disparate.] Here's the translation of the third song, "O Tod wie bitter bist du", taken from the apocryphal Book of Sirach:
""O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee. O Death, how acceptable is thy sentence unto a man that is needy and that faileth in strength, that is in extreme old age and is distracted in all things, and that looks for no better lot, nor waiteth on better days! O death, how acceptable is thy sentence.""
Brahms's "German Requiem" - perhaps his most deathless music - was also composed at a time of personal grief, following the death of the composer's mother. But the Four Earnest Songs, even with their Biblical texts, are plainly less sanguine about any sort of human imperishability. They are beautifully, bitterly pessimistic.

I can only second the rapturous reception this recording of Schwanengesang has received. After making a series of attention-getting lieder recitals for RCA, Quasthoff came into his own when he moved to DG and in addition found the superb Justus Zayen to accompany him. Together they pull us completely into Schubert's world and allow us to relax into the blissful communion unique with this composer.

I sympathize with the reviewer below who doesn't find the same dramatic excitment that Bryn Terfel extrcts from these songs. Quasthoff is altogether less theatrical, and he never exhorts. But Quasthoff's decision to balance romance with classicism is truer to Schubert, I think. Here he has discovered a multitude of colors and tones in his voice, yet they are presented on the scale of a drawing room, not an opera house.

Having heard him sing the Brahms Vier ernste Gesange in person, I found the recorded version a shade less compelling--in person Quasthoff can hold an audience spellbound and breathless with his inward, fervent religious feeling. Even so, this account stands at the summit alongside recordings from Janet Baker, Hans Hotter, and perhaps Thomas Allen. Neddless to add, I rate this an unsurpassed recital, the best lieder recording in a decade.

This recording was made in late 2000 when, we may now safely say with the benefit of hindsight, Thomas Quasthoff was at his absolute peak as a singer. It marks both an interpretative and vocal advance over his earlier, already very impressive, Schubert recital and we may marvel afresh at how flexible and even his voice is from the ringing top notes down to the trenchant, teaky bottom. He is billed as a baritone but is essentially a bass-baritone in that he sings the Brahms songs only a tone higher than a true bass like Kurt Moll. He thus combines the colouring of a bass with the ease of a high baritone, so the tessitura of these two song cycles (if we may properly call "Schwanengesang" that) holds no terrors for him; there is never any sense of strain. Listen to the descending passage digging down to a black low G on "Waffenbrüder" in "Kriegers Ahnung". Nor does he have to pull the trick of defaulting into an "arty" half-voice unless he really wants to; hence at times his voice rings out with the heft of an operatic baritone with real Italianate "ping" (such as at the beginning of no. 3 "O Tod"), yet at other times he employs a gentle falsetto such as we hear at the end of the same song.

The accompaniment by pianist Justus Zeyen could not be bettered; he is subtle, nuanced, lilting and impassioned by turns, complementing Quasthoff's every mood with perfectly judged dynamics. I could have done with just a tad more sense of release and bittersweet joy such as Terfel and Fassbaender bring to my favourite song "Die Taubenpost", the last and a late addition to "Schwanengesang". Quasthoff and Zeyen are rather reflective and melancholy here - but Shirley-Quirk does it that way, too and it is very beautiful. On the other hand, the rippling, turbulent cascades in "Liebesbotschaft" which open the whole sequence really make the listener sit up, so intense is the expectation they create. This promise immediately fulfilled when Quasthoff comes in and instantly displays the silky flexibility of his voice.

Another very rewarding aspect of this recording is the clarity of Quasthoff's diction. Yes, of course he is German but his enunciation has special beauty of its own.

The Brahms came out as top recommendation in the recent BBC Radio 3 CD Review survey of current recordings of the "Four Serious Songs"; the miracle of this CD is that you get not only that magnificent performance but the equally masterly "Schwanengesang" both on one disc.

Ordinarily, I am very much a fan of Quasthoff's recordings. His performance, on the DG label, of Brahm's 'Wie rafft' ich mich auf in der Nacht' is just about as sublime as lieder gets. Having said that, and perhaps as a result of coming to this recording from Terfel's magnificent performance with Martineau, I was severely disappointed by this recording.

I am quite surprised at the reviews this recording has received from other members of the public complimenting Quasthoff's vocal 'expression'. Admittedly, Quasthoff has a fantastic voice. The rich, dark, teutonic texture of his voice would match, one would assume, the rich, dark texture of these songs. Frustratingly, however, Quasthoff seems to me really quite detached from the variety of intense emotion that otherwise can be conveyed by this piece of music. His reading throughout the song cycle comes across as almost flat and unemotive. There is a strong sense of a kind of 'calculating deliberation' and ' technical perfection'in these songs that seems to prevent Quasthoff from embracing and communicating the rich, personal initmacy of these songs. It is as though he is reading from the score too closely, with a reluctance to 'let himself go', as it were, and deliver a more personal interpretation of these songs for fear of attracting censure and criticism. The result is disappointingly wooden. The vitality and exhuberance is missing form the earlier songs in the cycle and the deep, deep, personal isolation, loneliness and tragedy of the closing songs is almost completely absent. 'Am Meer' seems a particular case in point. The emotional climax of the song in the last verse is passes without any sense of desperation or awareness. Similar 'frustrations' exist throughout the cycle.

Perhaps, in my naivety, I am attracted to a too Romantic interpretation of these songs to be moved by Quasthoff's more clinical reading, but compared to the enormous and beautifully conveyed emotional range and subtlety of Terfel's recording, this recording does little for the imagination.

Terfel's CD, in case you are interested, though not seemingly available through Amazon, I have seen available on Ebay. Happy hunting.