Matthias Goerne, Andreas Haefliger, Koerner Hall, Toronto

07.28.10
Andreas Haefliger
Toronto National Post

By Arthur Kaptainis

Of all the classic European concert formats, the Lieder recital travels least happily to non-German-speaking lands. Conscious that great poetry is being sung on stage, we in the Americas are reduced to toggling our glance between the performers and printed texts, then further toggling between original and translated lines, all the while taking care not to fumble the pages and attract the indignant stares of the devout.

Sound like pure tedium? Well, it can be wonderful, as Matthias Goerne demonstrated Tuesday night in Koerner Hall under the auspices of the Toronto Summer Music Festival. There were fine interludes in this evening, although it should be noted straightaway that some of the finest were attributable to the Swiss pianist Andreas Haefliger.

For all his renown as a Lieder leader, Goerne does not look the part, close-cropped, open-collared and stuffed into a buttoned-up jacket that appears to be a size too small. Where masters of the past comported themselves with heaven-gazing nobility, Goerne grasps the piano lid and sways to and fro, as it if were a raft in a roiling sea.

Nor was his baritone ideally ripe in the first half of the concert, dedicated to settings of Heinrich Heine by Schumann, including the Liederkreis Op. 24, the less inspired of the two cycles bearing that name. In the extensive concluding song, Mit Myrthen und Rosen, we got a premonition of greater accomplishment after intermission, notably in the solemn last line, soft and low. One of the paradoxes of the Lieder recital is that such moments, and not hair-raising high Cs, function as climaxes.

For whatever reason, Brahms’s Op. 32 songs, after the break, sounded richer, more secure, more commanding. Great spectra of expression were traversed in single stanzas, true to Lieder-master form. The most exquisitely uttered item of all was Wie bist Du, meine Königin — perhaps not coincidentally the only title in the evening that could fairly be called a hit.

Haefliger was a constant source of rich colour, sweet rhythm and apt expression. Quite rightly, he had a solo turn, also in Brahms, the philosophical Three Intermezzi Op. 117. About 900 people listened to this intimate music with the greatest concentration. Toronto Summer Music attracts a big, classy crowd. No wonder