After the hugely ambitious and successful sweep through all of Schubert’s songs in the 2014 Oxford Lieder festival, there is the Schumann Project this time – a complete survey of his works for solo voices, running through almost every concert.
The festival now regularly attracts many of the world’s leading recitalists, and the peerless Christoph Prégardien seems to have become almost an annual visitor. The first half of this appearance with pianist Christoph Schnackertz was duly devoted to Schumann, with the Hans Christian Andersen songs Op 40 preceding the Heine Liederkreis Op 24. Every number became an object lesson in how a truly great Lieder singer makes the meaning and weight of each word matter, and how every fleck of emotion and colour can be conveyed in an utterly natural, confiding way.
His voice may no longer be as honeyed and even as it once was, but it remains a uniquely communicative and compelling instrument.
Prégardien and his partner would return to Schumann’s Heine settings for their encores – one of them the ballad Belsatzar, given an almost operatic theatricality – and Heine was represented in a group of Liszt songs too - there was the well known Loreley, and Im Rhein, Im Schönen Strome, a text that Schumann also included in his Dichterliebe. Max Bruch’s songs are hardly known at all, but the seven that Prégardien and Schnackertz included revealed two gems, the lingeringly beautiful Lausche, Lausche! and the haunting Um Mitternacht.
Prégardien, though, has the precious ability to make even most the most commonplace phrase matter and linger in the memory.
