Here is a disc that lives up to its title. The baritone Stéphane Degout and pianist Simon Lepper give us a stormy sequence of songs and ballads, most of them steeped in the German Romantic tradition, all of them delivered with the dramatic sense of true storytellers.
They start with Schubert’s Der Zwerg, spinning a gothic tale of a murderous dwarf, and then move on through similarly dark-painted numbers by Loewe, Schumann and Brahms to Wolf’s deliciously creepy Der Feuerreiter. Loewe’s setting of Edward – in which a man confesses to his mother that he has killed his father, then curses her for making him do it – seems fiery enough until you hear Brahms’s duet setting of the same poem, which comprehensively eclipses it, especially in such an urgent, edge-of-the-seat performance as this. It’s Felicity Palmer, no less, who sings the mother, and she’s wonderfully vivid; for the next number, Brahms’s Die Nonne und der Ritter, it’s the tender-voiced Marielou Jacquard who sings the melancholy nun.
Otherwise it’s just Degout and Lepper, whose nuanced, perfectly paced playing provides all the colour and illustrative touches these songs require: the flickering torchlight in Belshazzar’s castle as imagined by Schumann, the wind playing through the strings of a cimbalom as conjured by Liszt. It’s with Liszt that the disc ends: the Three Petrarch Sonnets, that in this context offer light relief. They are beautifully handled, Lepper’s playing flowing and just on the right side of understatement, Degout offering a masterclass in vocal control.
There’s some seriously superb singing on this disc: throughout, there’s the thrill of hearing a big voice perfectly calibrated to the music in hand, used with absolutely security. Degout never loses control, never tips over the line even if he sometimes seems to be standing on the edge, dangling one foot over the abyss. It’s quite a performance.
This week’s other pick
Lucy Stevens’ collection of vocal music by Ethel Smyth (Dame Ethel Smyth: Songs and Ballad) is another welcome step in the rediscovery of the music of this perplexingly neglected composer. The Four Songs with chamber orchestra and Stevens joined by the Berkeley Ensemble and the conductor Odaline de la Martinez, are piquant little French-perfumed gems. Stevens’ voice isn’t ideally fulsome higher up, but comes into its own in lower songs including the spellbinding Lullaby and the ballad of Fair Rohtraut, with Elizabeth Marcus the lively pianist.
