For Clara R Schumann: Kreisleriana, Op. 16; Brahms: Lieder, Op. 32 Konstantin Krimmel (baritone), Hélène Grimaud (piano) DG 486 4202 69:17 mins
Piano specialists may regard the addition of a baritone voice on this album as an intrusion, but actually this performance of Brahms’s Lieder und Gesänge is what makes it special. And it points to a moment in 19th-century cultural history which we in the 21st would do well to remember: that in Brahms’s day many German writers were not only well versed in medieval Persian poetry, but also translated a lot of it.
Konstantin Krimmel’s light and flexible baritone is well suited to the nine songs in question, in that he brings out the subtlety of the thoughts and images; love and loss are the leitmotifs, but they are treated with a sophistication comparable to that of English metaphysical poetry of the 17th century. Brahms’s settings are comparably exquisite – and profoundly moving – so it’s rather unfortunate that these recordings sometimes let the piano drown the singer.
But Hélène Grimaud herself is very much on form with this album. Apart from one movement – the penultimate one, which goes faster than I have ever heard it – her interpretations of Kreisleriana are conventional. Yet her pianistic voice is highly distinctive, and blessedly free of quirks or attention-seeking eccentricities. Under her hands all the pleasures of this portmanteau work emerge vividly: the passion of the opening movement and the breathless eagerness of the second; the dips into deep inwardness and the witty syncopations of the finale, which Grimaud makes deliciously sexy. Her account of the three Op. 117 Intermezzi has a rapt, valedictory quality which lingers in the mind long after the last notes have sounded.
Michael Church