In 1840, Schumann was finally able to marry Clara Wieck, and he celebrated his happiness in his songs, composing at least 138 of them, including his four great cycles, Dichterliebe, Frauenliebe und -leben, and the two Liederkreis. This carefully planned recital disc from the German baritone Samuel Hasselhorn, with Joseph Middleton as his unfailingly perceptive pianist, concentrates however on some of the other products of that extraordinary Liederjahre – settings of Heine, Kerner, Chamisso and Hans Christian Andersen.
The central works are the 12 Kerner Lieder Op 35, the last songs Schumann wrote in 1840. Their often troubled world hardly seems the work of a joyful newlywed at times, and occasionally they reveal Schumann’s debts to Schubert and to Beethoven’s An die Ferne Geliebte. They suit Hasselhorn’s rich, dark sound very well and highlight his ability to evoke emotional extremes, without ever losing his poise or sense of style.
That talent for projecting drama perhaps explains Hasselhorn’s other song choices. Just two were not written in 1840 – the Heine songs that make up Tragödie, from the Op 64 book of Romanzen und Balladen – which, alongside the superb Belsatzar and Die Beiden Grenadiere (also by Heine), Hasselhorn delivers with tremendous presence and authority. And perhaps to add a final contrast there are the five Lieder Op 40, four of them to poems by Andersen, and the other using a translation of a Greek folk song by Chamisso. If the first and last are light, almost frothy, the other three are unmistakably tragic, and Hasselhorn and Middleton capture perfectly what Schumann called their “disturbing strangeness”.
This week’s other pick
Two of Schumann’s greatest songs, Widmung from Myrthen Op 25, and Mondnacht from the Op 39 Liederkreis, are among the 27 numbers on Selige Stunde, the latest collection from tenor Jonas Kaufmann. His selection with pianist Helmut Deutsch ranges from Mozart to Zemlinsky, but very little of it makes a good advert for one of the most celebrated singers in the world today. Perhaps Kaufmann’s operatic career has coarsened his approach to lieder; if this disc is anything to go by, it’s coarsened his voice, too: hollow whispers substitute for true mezza voce, and phrases are crooned with untidy portamentos, while some numbers, Mondnacht included, suggest a voice under considerable strain. No doubt Kaufmann’s legions of doting fans will lap it up; others should approach with more caution.
