It gives me no pleasure to award a low rating to Nathalie Stutzmann’s latest Schubert recital since I’ve often admired her singing in the past. When reviewing her 2004 recording of Schubert’s Winterreise (see reviews archive) I had to report hearing “upward slides, scooping, patches of uncertain pitch, and other deficiencies.” Sadly, those same problems afflict this disc, along with mushy diction and interpretive mannerisms similar to those that helped make her Winterreise so disappointing.
All of those shortcomings are on display in a lugubrious Ständchen that also includes unpleasant sustained phrases, wince-inducing occasions repeated so often on this disc that they seem to become uncontrollable tics. In Der Atlas, for example, she affects a vibratoless voice that becomes “white”, its colorless properties accentuated by intonation problems. The intensity I admired in portions of her Winterreise is less prominent here, even in Death and the Maiden, where Death’s warm contralto turns into a solid baritonal burr. In Der Wanderer, which can be among the most devastating of Schubert songs, with a last line sung by the narrator’s “ghostly breath” that goes “There, where you are not, is happiness,” you feel the intensity but not the overwhelming existential angst heard in other interpretations.
In case you’re wondering what Death and the Maiden and Der Wanderer are doing in a Schwanengesang, they’re among the five lieder interposed after Die Taubenpost, the 14th and last song of the published version of the D.957 set, here sung first. The rest of the songs follow Der Wanderer in an order devised by Stutzmann. Moving the songs around within the set is a common practice in this cycle that really is not a cycle but a random collection assembled by Schubert’s publisher after the composer’s death.
Pianist Inger Södergren’s positive accompaniments are a plus here, but they hardly compensate for the singing, or for engineering that sometimes exaggerates the singer’s breathiness. Turn to Brigitte Fassbaender on DG, who also interpolates five (other) songs between Die Taubenpost and the rest of a differently reordered Schwanengesang, for an intense, imaginative interpretation that makes you forget her aging voice. [3/6/2006]
