It’s frustrating to hear so much evident talent go to waste. Michael Tilson Thomas has the orchestra playing very beautifully, but his interpretation seems oddly indifferent, if not contrary to the musical sense. Vocally, Susan Graham sings the Rückert songs excellently, but Thomas rushes her through several of them, including “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder” and crucially, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”. The exaggerated tempo contrasts in the first of the Wayfarer songs also come off as sounding affected rather than naturally flowing.
The remaining songs belong to Thomas Hampson, and here there are all kinds of problems. First, he simply hasn’t much voice left. In the middle of his range he sings well enough, but his lower register wobbles, and he often resorts to a sort of crooning falsetto on high that’s most irritating. Sometimes (as in “Revelge”) he stops singing entirely and simply shouts, as Fischer-Dieskau used to do at similar moments. That first Wayfarer song aside, the remainder of the cycle comes off pretty well, but the selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn don’t cut it.
In the first place, Hampson has no business singing “Urlicht”; it was written for a contralto, and he sounds mightily uncomfortable with the tessitura. Second, the selection of songs (the others are “Lied des Verfolgten im Turm”, “Der Tamboursg’sell”, and “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen”) highlights Mahler’s militant and “spiritual” sides, and poorly represents the range of Wunderhorn songs. There’s nothing representing the collection’s humor or folkish charm; and although it’s hard to imagine these artists responding to that aspect of the music, the results here (especially concluding with that abominable “Urlicht”) give the impression of little more than a pretentious straining for effect. Hampson, in any case, recorded both the Wayfarer and Rückert songs for DG under Bernstein, in much better voice. An odd, mostly unfortunate release.
