Concert review – Schumann, Bostridge and Mehldau at the Wigmore Hall
To the Wigmore Hall on Sunday evening to see two of the West’s most celebrated musicians in tandem – the American pianist Brad Mehldau and English tenor Ian Bostridge – for the UK premiere of Mehldau’s new song cycle The Folly of Desire and a performance of Schumann’s Dichterliebe.
In his programme notes, Mehldau introduces his composition as “an inquiry into the limits of post-#MeToo Romantic irony” – and the song cycle is indeed a rich and urgent meditation on the knotty relationship between desire and its fulfilment, and carnality and love.
We begin with love as elemental pollution with William Blake’s The Sick Rose, where love’s “crimson joy” is already putrefied by “the invisible worm”, sung in a fantastically mournful tone and underwritten by a looping, teasing refrain on the piano.
Then WB Yeats’s Leda and the Swan, with its horrifying associations of sublimity and rape (“Her thighs caressed by the dark webs”) and on to Shakespeare’s Sonnets 147 (“Past cure I am, now reason is past care”) and 75 (“So are you to my thoughts as food to life”), with the lover figured now as just a pale simulacrum of the object he desires.
The centrepiece of the cycle is Goethe’s Ganymed, set to slamming chords of extraordinary intensity and a soaring vocal line that allows Bostridge to swing free of all restraint: “Umfangend umfangen!” (“Embracing, embraced!”), he sings triumphant at last.
That’s about as good as it gets for our lovers with their ecstatic union broken up by a spritely rendition of “the boys I mean are not refined” by ee cummings (“They do whatever’s in their pants”, Bostridge harrumphs), a choice that rounds off the song cycle with a nicely demotic edge.
Ian Bostridge is quite a spectacle on stage – half the time I don’t know how he can sing at all with his shoulders hunched, his hands flopped up away from his body, now leaning right over the piano, now his eyes furiously lasering the audience, a bit of sighing here, a quite maniacal grin there – and it’s hard not to be completely mesmerised by the whole thing.
Schumann’s title for the song cycle Dichterliebe, or the ‘poet’s love’, is quite different to Heinrich Heine’s own choice of title for the collection of poems Schumann sets to music, Buch der Lieder, simply ‘Book of Songs’, and Bostridge’s signature performance style allows us to experience in real time a poet’s travails in love.
At first everything is well – all flights of fancy (“Die Rose, die Lilie die Taube, die Sonne”, ‘Rose, lily, dove, sun”), love’s bliss (“Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’, So schwindet all mein Leid un Weh”, ‘When I look into your eyes, all my pain and sorrow vanish’), twirling rhythms and plangent tunes.
Then the tone shifts (“Wenn das Herz auch bricht” ‘though my heart is breaking’) and the deserted lover is plunged into a nightmare vision (“Die Traume bos und arg” ‘bad and bitter dreams’) – his memory jammed with images of her, she is all he can dream of and all he can sing about.
Some resolution is found at the close of the song cycle when the lover binds up all his memories and places them in a large coffin he sends to the bottom of the sea, the 19th century equivalent of unfollowing an ex on Instagram I suppose.
After the performance, to raucous applause, Bostridge and Mehldau returned to the stage for a rather wonderful encore of Frank Sinatra’s These Foolish Things – “Two lovers on the street who walk like dreamers. Oh, how the ghost of you clings! These foolish things remind me of you…”