“The weather and my dear friend God gave me a little cold,” René Pape told his audience, with a rueful smile, at the start of his Wigmore debut recital. He was determined, he said, not to let a bit of a fever put him off. “But please forgive me,” he added, “if some of my notes are not as great as you expected.” In the event, however, the concert proved a vindication of artistry over circumstance, and the best of it was truly magnificent.
He opened with two sacred song cycles, Beethoven’s Sechs Lieder von Gellert and Dvořák’s austere Biblical Songs, reflecting the composer’s isolation during his American sojourn. There was some constriction in his voice at the start, which eased when he reached Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur in the Beethoven and the majesty of his singing began to emerge. The Dvořák is overlong and uneven. But despite occasional moments of thinness in the sound, he made a strong case for it. His pianist Camillo Radicke, did much with the sparsely inflected accompaniments.
Perhaps he had been saving himself, for when he returned after the interval for Roger Quilter’s Three Shakespeare Songs and Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, however, his voice was in fine shape. Quilter’s sad, sweet ironies were scrupulously judged. Mussorgsky’s unremitting meditation on mortality, meanwhile, was simply outstanding, its seductive morbidity and nihilistic violence all the more chilling for being delivered with such beauty of tone and formidable authority.
