The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday February 7 2007
In our review of a Wigmore Hall concert below we referred to the 310th anniversary of Schubert's birth. We meant the 210th anniversary. He was born in Vienna on January 31 1797.
concert to mark Schubert's birthday at the end of January has become an annual custom at the Wigmore Hall. This year's, for the 310th anniversary, focused less on the man himself than on his lesser-known contemporaries.
Pianist Graham Johnson was in charge of a typically wide-ranging programme, with each item introduced from the platform. To deliver it there was a top-flight quartet of British-based singers - soprano Claire Booth (a same-day replacement for the ill Susan Gritton, though you would never have guessed), mezzo Ann Murray, tenor Mark Padmore and baritone Roderick Williams. What Schubert there was kept away from the predictable too. The part-song An Die Sonne began the evening, which ended with a group of his Italian settings and capped by a piece of froth from Rossini. The comic trio Der Hochzeitbraten, with its echoes of German Singspiel and a moderately risque scenario, about a couple (Booth and Padmore) who go poaching on the eve of their wedding and fall foul of the local gamekeeper (Williams), introduced some humour.
Elsewhere the musical standards varied. Johnson had found a number of settings of texts that Schubert himself had used, especially from Goethe and Müller. If few of them were real discoveries, there was just occasionally a number to stop you in your tracks - Ludwig Berger's Des Baches Lied, sung with perfect subdued intensity by Murray, explored far greater depths than his other straightforward lyrics, while Jeannette Bürde's Der Berghirt was an appealingly winsome piece. Songs by Fanny Mendelssohn and Schumann (his very first, composed when he was 17) hinted at the new expressive world that the next generation of German composers would open up; both, like the rest, were done with all the necessary stylishness and charm.
