Baritone Dietrich Henschel has always done things differently, and his latest project, Wunderhorn, is a big multimedia piece that re-invents Mahler in terms of live music and film. With the BBC Symphony on fine form for Alexander Vedernikov, he sings Des Knaben Wunderhorn complete, using versions by Detlev Glanert for the songs Mahler left un-orchestrated. His performance, in turn, forms the soundtrack to a largely silent arthouse movie by Clara Pons, set in France during the first world war, in which he also plays a volunteer soldier whose traumatised best friend (Sébastien Dutrieux) has become a vicious officer with violent designs on Henschel’s wife (Vera Streicher).
Pons’s deployment of religious imagery suggests that war is the ultimate indication of man’s fallen state after the expulsion from Eden, and Henschel proves a powerful actor, whose careworn face and sinewy body are filmed with an emotional nakedness reminiscent of Dreyer or Pasolini. But the visuals sometimes sit uneasily with the music. The officer’s rape of the wife is accompanied by Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt, a song Mahler intended to be satirically funny. And Pons’s elliptical method, all gliding time shifts and slow-mo abstractions, leaves too many narrative questions unanswered – Henschel’s character is eventually executed by firing squad, but we are never told why.
There are musical problems, too. Mahler never intended Des Knaben Wunderhorn to be tackled by a single performer, and it is usually shared between two, or occasionally four singers. There’s no mistaking Henschel’s commitment, and his singing blazes with the familiar intensity that makes him so remarkable. But some of the songs lie awkwardly for him, putting pressure on his upper registers where his intonation sometimes comes uncharacteristically adrift. He remains a great and unique artist, but this, sadly, doesn’t always find him at his best.
