Word: schubert
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...German lied is a highly perishable article--a gracious and intimate form of musical entertainment which, in the hands of singers less gifted than Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, rarely finds a congenial concert setting. On Wednesday night, Madame Schwarzkopf, assisted by her excellent pianist John Wustman, offered lieder of Schubert, Wolf, and Strauss to a large audience at the Harvard Square Theatre, and it is a measure of her artistry that every nuance of these songs, every dramatic point and humorous inflection, was as telling as it might have been in the living-room of someone's home...
...quite the purity and control of four or five years ago, and the acoustics of the HST seem bright and clear almost to a fault. Handel's Care selve, for example, suffered from too many changes of vocal color within its long phrases, and the exaltation of Schubert's Auf dem Wasser zu singen was conveyed more in the singer's facial expression than in the somewhat imperfect articulation of the notes. Madame Schwarzkopf's historical curiosity got the better of her usually flawless taste when she chose to sing a version of Mozart's Voi che sapete "with embellishments...
...small disappointments of the first part of the program seemed scarcely important, however, by the time Madame Schwarzkopf had finished singing Schubert's Seligkeit, one of the seven encores which she bestowed upon the audience with the charm of someone giving candy to children who have behaved well. Here her voice soared buoyantly; the pianissimi were fine-spun and beautifully controlled. This vocal gold was at the service of an extraordinary musical intelligence in the Hugo Wolf group which followed the intermission: each song, as Miss Schwarzkopf rendered it, became a drama in miniature. The alternately anguished and tender dialogue...
Barenboim has honed his talents on a wide variety of masters: Bach, Mozart. Schubert. Brahms. Beethoven (by age 14, he knew all 32 of the Beethoven sonatas). He works at the piano only about two hours a day, because "you may lose freshness if you sit all day practicing." sometimes plays the violin to help him understand what the composer has written for the piano and feels that every musician should do some composing (as he does) to give his playing "a quality of understanding." Though he has made six recordings, he does not enjoy listening to them...
...major works on the program, jointly performed by the two choruses, were di Lasso's Penitential Psalm, 'De Profundis,' Beethoven's 'Elegischer Gesang,' Op. 118, and Schubert's Mass in G Major. The worst-performed, Schubert's Mass, written at 18, suffered from an execrable accompaniment by a small string ensemble. In their solo passages, the strings sounded uniformly out of tune, weak, uncertain, and uncoordinated Beneath the chorus, they could only muddle the texture a little, but almost did derange the pitch and rhythm of the three excellent soloists. Sure and accurate, Tenor David Griffith, Soprano Emily Romney...