Shostakovich much admired Mahler, and we regularly find their music programmed together. But can – and should – their works be interwoven, rather than performed side by side? Matthias Goerne and Leif Ove Andsnes clearly think so. Their Wigmore concert interspersed six songs from Shostakovich's Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti with excerpts from Kindertotenlieder, the Rückert-Lieder and Des Knaben Wunderhorn. It was a strange experience on a number of counts.
The underlying idea was to create an extended meditation on death, but the reality proved unsatisfactory. The Wunderhorn songs and Rückert-Lieder can be performed individually, and often are. But Mahler's disquieting study of parental grief, and Shostakovich's great, terminal examination of the relationship between artistic integrity and posthumous fame, lose their power and meaning when performed incomplete and, in the case of the Shostakovich, with the songs in the wrong order. The occasional telling juxtaposition didn't prevent the whole sequence from feeling bitty.
More pertinent, perhaps, is the fact that Goerne's artistry is no longer what it was. His voice is still in reasonable shape and his noted technical accomplishments – eloquently shaped lines, finely controlled high pianissimos – remain secure. The expressionistic intensity of utterance, however, that once made everything he did so electrifying, only surfaced towards the end on this occasion, in his barked, military Revelge (Reveille) and the sullen anger of Der Tambourg'sell (The Drummer Boy). His habit of signifying introversion by turning away from the audience and singing to a wall remains tedious.
The great pleasure of the evening came from Andsnes, despite the fact that the decision to run the songs continuously resulted in the Wigmore bronchitics coughing through most of his introductions. Wonderfully penumbral in the Shostakovich, he picked out Mahler's counterpoint with exquisite, Bach-like lucidity.
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