Over the past 36 years, William Lyne has transformed the Wigmore Hall into an indispensable part of British musical life, and one of the world's finest venues for chamber music and lieder. He is retiring this season, and in celebration of his achievements, his Director's festival runs from now until next May.
The opening gala was a star-studded affair, with mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager accompanied by Julius Drake, and tenor Ian Bostridge partnered by Mitsuko Uchida. Yet the only concession towards celebratory flamboyance on the programme was Kirchschlager's performance of Schubert's Ständchen, with an eight-voice male choir. Otherwise, the tone was serious and intense, in sets of songs by Schumann, Schubert, Wolf and Britten.
Bostridge's half of the concert was dominated by images of loss and death, in Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis and Britten's Winter Words. He created an infatuated and tortured hero in the Schumann, and found a sensitive partnership with Uchida. Each song was a miniature drama: Twilight began as a hymn to crepuscular shadows, but ended with paranoia and gloom, and Bostridge's chilling warning to beware the treachery of the night. Uchida's accompaniment dramatised this emotional journey, as sinuous melodic lines dissolved into a sequence of stark, staccato chords. After this disturbing ambivalence, the joy of the final number was fleeting and illusory. Britten's Winter Words, setting poems by Thomas Hardy, was no less affecting.
Yet the most complete performance on the programme was Kirchschlager's interpretation of Wolf's Four Mignon Lieder. These remarkable settings transform Goethe's teenage heroine into a complex and tragic figure. Kirchschlager created a sense of desperation throughout the four songs, from the flighty, aphoristic second song to the imposing structure of the final Kennst du das Land? (Do you know the land?). She and Drake made each verse increase in intensity until they released a huge torrent of sound in the climactic passage, Wolf's musical depiction of the rock and flood of Goethe's poem. Kirchschlager brilliantly traversed the musical and emotional spectrum of these songs, from vulnerable intimacy to grand, declamatory passion.
