Feb. 06--The distinction between public and private kept coming to mind Thursday night at Symphony Center as I listened to the superbly musical German baritone Matthias Goerne taking the Chicago Symphony Orchestra audience through an unusual and deeply rewarding program of orchestrated German lieder.
Art songs, by their very definition, are intensely private expressions of emotion, brief poems set to music and almost always sung with only piano accompaniment, in intimate venues. That's how most of us know the 11 songs by Franz Schubert and Richard Strauss Goerne presented on this occasion, with Jaap van Zweden conducting. For that matter, Goerne has cultivated a loyal, local audience for German lieder through his probing interpretations of this repertory in his regular recital appearances at Ravinia since his festival debut in 2001.
Dressed in symphonic garb and played by a good-sized orchestra in a modern concert hall, however, the songs become more public statements, addressed to the many rather than to the few. This shift of scale presents a singer with both opportunities and drawbacks. Goerne proved on Thursday that he is able to negotiate that shift in ways that make the differences seem minor and irrelevant: All that mattered was the truth of the song. With the Dutch conductor he had a most sensitive collaborator to help him project that truth to his listeners.
Goerne's canny mixing and matching of four Schubert songs and seven by Strauss made for effective contrasts of musical and poetic mood and atmosphere. Van Zweden's careful handling of the rarely heard orchestrations (by Brahms, Max Reger, Anton Webern and others) brought enough coloristic richness and textural variety to complement the singing, without ever swamping the singer.
The songs perfectly suited Goerne's dark, burnished baritone, his masterful legato, the fullness, evenness and ease of his tonal emission throughout a wide range. So clear was his German enunciation that you could have taken dictation from it. Beyond the sheer beauty of his voice lay the sensibility of a born lieder interpreter, the greatest of his generation.
His selection of lieder alternated tender, romantic sentiments with powerful, passionate declamation. Even the soppiest of poetry -- Strauss' "Das Rosenband" ("The Rose Ribbon") and "Freundliche Vision" ("Pleasant Vision") were prime examples -- emerged fresh and sincere of feeling.
Familiar songs such as Schubert's "An Silvia" ("To Sylvia") and Strauss' "Morgen" ("Tomorrow") shared the bill with such welcome discoveries as Schubert's "Greisengesang" ("Frost Has Covered the Roof of My House"), which, in Brahms' orchestration, was infused with the dusky coloration of lower brass and violas. Another highlight was Strauss' "Ruhe, meine Seele" ("Rest, My Soul"), its haunting stillness broken by the delicate voices of celesta and violin.
Van Zweden's accompaniments were things of great, caring subtlety in their own right. Every inflection, every bit of rubato molding in Goerne's singing, was supported by the pliant playing van Zweden drew from the orchestra: It was as if the musicians were listening to the soloist as quietly and intently as the audience.
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which occupied the second half of the program, is, by contrast, as public a musical statement as any in the standard repertory. Its famous opening four notes are iconic in classical music. The work figured prominently in the very first concert of the CSO's very first season in 1891 and has popped up repeatedly since then. Everybody who is anybody has conducted it here. So what could van Zweden possibly do with it?
Plenty, as it turned out. He is one of the better Beethoven conductors around and he elicited a taut, energized, finely articulated account that made one happy to hear this staple yet again. Nothing felt on autopilot; nothing felt routine. One would never have guessed the orchestra had just returned from a tiring Carnegie Hall tour under Riccardo Muti, so shipshape was the playing. Van Zweden brought out the raspy proclamations of the three horns, one of several personalized touches in his winning interpretation.
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; $33-$250; 312-294-3000, cso.org.
jvonrhein@tribpub.com
Twitter @jvonrhein
