Anne Sofie von Otter Recital, 8/19/2005

Anne Sofie von Otter
Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, CA
Wednesday, August 19, 2005

Mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and pianist Bengt Forsberg returned to the Bay Area on Wednesday, August 19, 2005, with an utterly delightful recital, mostly of song but happily including several piano solos as well. The two make an ideally matched artistic duo, phrasing together as easily and comfortably as breathing, in music as different as Messiaen songs and Broadway tunes. I wish the venue had been smaller than Zellerbach, but von Otter’s directness and intimacy seemed to shrink the place to half its size. She’s a thoroughly honest performer, with every vocal and physical gestures growing naturally from the musical and textual heart of whatever she’s singing, none of it applied after the fact or in a calculating manner.

The duo opened with sets of songs by Jean Sibelius and a Swedish contemporary of Sibelius’s, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger. Von Otter spoke to the audience about Peterson-Berger, with whose name and music Americans are unlikely to be familiar. She said he was a fierce music critic whose music was in a folk style similar to Grieg’s. Certainly the texts of his op. 12 songs (“Marits visor”) had some folkish charm, full of calves and ducklings and talking cats who steal cream and fish, but the musical settings were rather more sophisticated than that, especially the gently rocking “Holder du af mig” (“If you love me”). To Sibelius’s “Hertig Magnus” (“Duke Magnus”), in which a Duke is lured from his castle by a water-nymph (he survives), and “Kaiutar” (“The Echo-Nymph”), about a nymph abandoned by her lover, von Otter brought the opera singer’s dramatic power magically to bear, in two splendid pieces of story-telling. 

The recital then shifted in time and place to 20^th century France; while von Otter took a short break, Forsberg spoke about and then played Henri Dutilleux’s 1988 Prelude No. 3: “Le Jeu des Contraires.” “It’s a beautiful score to look at,” he said, because of the contrary motion in the two hands. It’s a beautiful score to hear, as well, with its gentle Stravinskian harmonies, as much parallel as contrary motion, gorgeous clouds of sound, and many pedal effects spectacularly rendered. For all of this, his articulation was perfectly, paradoxically, clear. 

Von Otter then returned for three Messiaen songs. Composed when Messiaen was only 22, to texts by himself and his mother, the poet Cécile Sauvage, the songs are a far cry from the mysticism and bird song of Messiaen’s mature style. Still, they’re written with staggering confidence for so young a composer. Von Otter brought a fierce, yet restrained, passion to the songs, with sovereign dynamic control and enormous variety in her vibrato. The first half of the recital closed with three songs by Reynaldo Hahn. The first of these, in a ripe salon style, suitably brought a richer, warmer tone from von Otter than the other songs, which were pastiches of Baroque style. 

Of all the songs on the program, only “Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht” (“When my darling has her wedding day”), the first song in Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, was less than fully successful. Von Otter’s bright mezzo contains all the colors of sunshine and moonlight – but this song wants the kind of tragic depth best provided by a true contralto. The remaining songs in the cycle were more naturally suited to her vocal character, especially the initially-ebullient “Ging heut Morgen übers Felt” (“I walked the fields this morning”). Forsberg followed with a pair of Grieg piano works from the opposite ends of the composer’s career; the earlier, from his Op. 1 piano pieces, might almost have been by Brahms. 

The concert closed with groups of English and Irish folksong settings by, respectively, Percy Grainger and Howard Ferguson. I always worry when I see texts in English dialect, or with too many “drinkin”s or “milkin”s, in the program for a song recital, but these settings ranged from the competent to the magical, and von Otter and Forsberg’s respectful presentation kept them from being any kind of comedown from the preceding Mahler. Pride of place would go to Grainger’s sweet “British Waterside,” the pure simplicity of Ferguson’s “Calen-o,” and his jaunty and rustic “I’m from over the mountain.”

The encores were a Swedish folksong and a delightfully jazzy and theatrical performance of Jerome Kern’s “Pick Yourself Up.”