Christian Gerhaher, Wigmore Hall

Whenever Christian Gerhaher visits London, he leaves the audience praying for more. His voice has a rare tenderness and beauty, almost akin to an instrument in its purity. He favours intimacy over histrionics, magnifying the emotional power of the songs not through operatic melodrama but through letting the words speak for themselves. And he’s the consummate thinker-singer, tailoring each piece to its text. After a glut of five-star appearances in recent years, the German baritone will return to Wigmore Hall this November to enact a thrillingly diverse line-up of lieder. He will be joined, as ever, by long term accompanist Gerold Huber, whose poised grace serves as the perfect match to Gerhaher’s elegance.
The programme begins with a coupling of two pieces composed across an almost hundred-year gap. First comes Beethoven’s Ah die ferne Geliebte (1816), widely considered the earliest great song cycle. It is a linked series of six pieces, depicting a man bridging his separation from his lover by sending her songs. Possessed of the same pastoral vitality as 6^th Symphony, it proved hugely influential, especially on Schumann. It will be followed by Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hangenden Garten (1908-9), the great innovator’s first atonal work. Its fifteen songs take the tragic love poems of Stefan George and transform them into an unprecedented mode of expression.
The second half of the concert is just as eclectic. It begins with a selection of Haydn’s songs, which showcase the composer’s unique sense of order and balance and, more than his instrumental and large-scale vocal music, provide hints of the romantic movement to come. Berg’s Altenberg Lieder (1911-2) follow, works of wildly lyrical passion that continue down the path opened by Schoenberg. Originally set for orchestra, here they will be stripped down to their wrenching core. Finally, Gerhaher and Huber will return to Beethoven, for his aching, yearning Adelaide (1795). If the programme and the performer’s records are anything to go by, this will be a night to remember.