Not bad, but far from excellent. Katarina Karnéus has a nice feeling for the texts, and an attractive voice that sounds well as long as the music flows onward. Ging heut’ morgen über’s Feld, for example, is delightful, and the lighter Rückert songs lack nothing in delicacy and charm. Under pressure, however, or at slower tempos, her voice has a vibrato that can become distracting. Fan though I am of a warm “timbral” vibrato in string playing, it really is distressing in vocal music, and it’s alarming how few singers, even very young ones, seem capable of sustaining long notes without sounding tremulous.
The problem is exacerbated by Susanna Mälkki’s soft-edged, gutless conducting. Had it not been for the very fast (too fast for proper accentuation) final song of Kindertotenlieder, this might have been the slowest performance on disc. Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgehn is excruciating in the wrong ways, and there’s insufficient internal contrast between numbers. The end of Um Mitternacht sounds muted and dreary despite the nice balances between voice, brass, and harp/piano. Well played, typically well recorded, yet ultimately disappointing.
