Brahms
Lieder
Christian Gerhaher (baritone), Gerold Huber (piano)
Sony Classical 19802897352 67:10 mins
How many of Brahms’s more than 200 songs do we hear regularly? Only a handful. But then their preoccupation with heartbreak, death and romantic despair scarcely makes for a joyous outing.
Christian Gerhaher and his regular partner Gerold Huber are admirably serious in this recording, making a compelling case for the emotions that underpin these lieder. Never mind that the composer was preoccupied with folk music patterns in his songs as an academically zealous programme note tells us, here baritone and pianist make the composer’s dark emotional response to the world live for us. Even in the jolly month of May (‘Die Mainacht’) there are tears.
The sweetness of tone that Gerhaher produced when younger has faded, but his sense of drama is unchanged, the ability to characterise different voices – the two lovers’ voices in a song like ‘Von ewiger Liebe’. While his phrasing and diction are masterly as he transforms a late song ‘Meine Lieder’ into a kind of artistic credo for Brahms, with the piano quietly probing the poet’s unforgotten ‘pale ecstasies’ shadowed by mortality.
Huber is a scrupulous partner throughout. There’s a delicate shift to the minor in the postlude to ‘Dein blaues Auge hält’; so still. How can we be certain this love will endure? In Brahms’s world it rarely does. And if you ever doubted this composer’s ability to write a heart-stopping melody, listen to ‘Wie bist du, meine Königin’.