Mahler
Songs of Fate
Anna Lucia Richter (mezzo-soprano), Gürzenich-Orchester Köln/Jordan de Souza
Myrios Classics MYR036 55:28 mins
The booklet accompanying this remarkable release begins with a short interview with Anna Lucia Richter. She all at once pins down the conundrum of how to approach Mahler’s song-settings from the folk anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn): ‘They demand naturalness’. Indeed, and how does a highly trained concert singer capture that, which in its way is in opposition to the artistic sophistication that’s also required?
Richter engages happily with the paradox. Her mezzo-soprano voice is impressively true and sure, ranging from a dusky low register to a lovely way with floating high notes, and a beautiful range of shades and colours to conjure the music’s shifting range of moods. One interpretation after another comes across unerringly, from the Schubert-like charm of ‘Rheinlegendchen’ (Little Rhine Legend) to the melting poignancy of ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’ (Where the lovely Trumpets sound – an image of death and beyond).
While some of Mahler’s humorous settings today can’t help sounding a touch arch, Richter opts for deftness rather than exaggeration, in this way exactly capturing the wry irony of ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ (St Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes).
Meanwhile, Mahler’s wondrous orchestrations are delivered at state-of-the-art level by the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln. The principal horn and trumpet players are exceptional; and at every point, Jordan de Souza’s conducting is a masterclass in how to conjure one haunting musical moment after another without getting in the way.
But if this level of music-making is something special, Richter’s delivery of Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) comes from another dimension altogether. Mahler began this cycle when his two daughters were not yet born; while Friedrich Rückert’s poems had been written after the death of two of his children, it’s more likely that Mahler, one of the oldest of 14 siblings, was remembering having witnessed the deaths of eight of these while he was growing up.
The music’s emotional charge here is indeed so powerful that it can often seem to be not fully realisable in performance. Richter’s response upends any such expectation: her identification with the songs and their subject-matter appears total, and the artistic result both mesmerises and disturbs the listener.
One particular moment must stand for countless others – the final line of the second of the five songs, where the children are imagined as saying: ‘Look straight at us, because soon we will be far away! What to you are only eyes in these days, in the nights to come will be only stars.’ Richter floats the last word, ‘Sterne’, with a poise and beauty that seem supernatural. This is as near great singing as makes no difference.