Matthias Goerne (at the Ravinia Music Festival on July 31, 2014)

Reached by commuter train, Ravinia Music Park seems a place set apart, a sylvan locus amoenus hidden in the woods.  The northbound Metra Train, headed for Waukegan and Kenosha, forges ahead through a tunnel of forest, a dense wall of green on both sides of the right-of-way.  For all I know, this rail-side thicket is merely a boundary grove, shrubbery at the rear of some rich man's estate or the trees veiling the parking lot of a big shopping mall.  But from the moving train, the woods along the right-of-way look dark and deep and mysterious with shadow.  The park itself seems also enclosed in forest, a few acres of lawn with wooden pavilions of uncertain age and provenance, some restaurants in buildings that look like National Park lodges, sculptures and statuary on pedestals along the paths and backed into niches in the groves along the edge of the property.  Noble trees shade the grass and elegant-looking people are dining al fresco, reclining like the Romans of the Decadence on lawn chairs, dazzling white tablecloths spread on the grass as a background to their wines, their artisan breads, their brie and camembert.  For this Thursday night concert of German art-songs, sparsely attended as one might imagine, the gelato concessions and the kiosks selling souvenirs are shuttered.  The evening advances and the lawn becomes dark and, for the concert in the Martin Theater, the ushers open front and side doors to the night and one expects that bats, perhaps, will penetrate the concert hall and enliven it with their swoops and dizzying lunges.  I don't know what is beyond the railroad track, the small parking lot next to the right-of-way and the tunnel that leads under the tracks into the music park with its arched, wooden gate.  Perhaps, a bustling city is just beyond the wall of trees but who knows?  Here, the night is grey and smooth as the fur of a Siamese cat and the remote arcades of trees are hushed.  Matthias Goerne is a Weimar-born baritone, the heir to Fischer-Dieskau.  His voice is a gift from the gods, almost too lush and candied.  He used his ordinary speaking voice on several occasions to announce encores (both cabaret-style ballads with words by Brecht), and, even in that application, the tone of his speech was remarkably resonant -- like an old-time FM disk-jockey whispering into the microphone after the midnight hour on a show featuring smooth jazz.  Goerne sang selections from the Hollywood Song Book, mostly small lapidary Lieder with words by Brecht set by the composer Hanns Eisler in 1942 -- the songs were not performed until 1982.  Eisler was a refugee from the Nazis who washed-up like many other German emigres in Hollywood.  He wrote scores for Hollywood features including the noteworthy Hangmen Also Die directed by Fritz Lang from a screenplay by Brecht but seems to have detested southern California, was appalled by the overt, if honest, hucksterism of the movie business, and suffered pangs of homesickness.  Goerne's voice is almost too rich for the Hollywood Liederbuch -- Brecht's poems are sardonic and ferocious, frequently obscene (the "angels" of Los Angeles smell of KY jelly and sport gold pessaries), and seem to suggest something less honeyed that Goerne's fantastically beautiful tones.  Nonetheless, it was a great pleasure to hear Goerne's voice and his phrasing and, of course, musically the concert seemed to me impeccable.  The little songs slip by at high speed, sung without more than a few seconds intervening, and some of the Lieder are only forty or fifty seconds long.  Eisler, who was deported from the US during the Red scare, ended up in East Germany where he actually wrote the DDR's national anthem.  On the evidence of the songs Goerne presented, Eisler was a dour, humorless German of exquisite musical sensibility -- one important element of his art is Eisler's modesty:  his songwriting is essentially unassuming and the little songs remain miniatures -- Eisler doesn't have the singer repeat important lines for emphasis, doesn't embellish, and doesn't overtly dramatize the words.   Between sets of Hollywood Liederbuch songs, Goerne presented a half-dozen or so longer and more ambitious-seeming songs by Hugo Wolf, particularly some very lush late Romantic settings of poems by Goethe.  The orotund declamatory beauty of those settings seemed to me, perhaps, more ideally suited to Goerne's supernaturally rich voice.  Also part of the program were Eisler's settings of several sonnets by Michelangelo -- these were more conventionally declamatory as well, fierce, operatic and defiant and, therefore, well-suited to Goerne's instrument, and one of these songs, featuring a narrator who turns out to be dead was sufficiently eerie and surprising to send chills up your spine.  Several of Eisler's songs, called Ernste Lieder ("Serious Songs") set Hoelderlin odes to music -- Hoelderlin's difficult diction and the complexity of his verse, often rife with odd unexpected reversals of meaning, is almost too dense for musical presentation.  Goerne's work on those poems was splendid but the songs were hard to grasp in this setting and, I suppose, profound, requiring additional study.  (Similarly, two Eisler songs in English based on Pascal Pensees were too dense and abstract to be appreciated on first hearing.)  Goerne is a small, dumpy-looking German who would not be out of place at a beer festival in New Ulm.  He has a pasty complexion and staring, completely globular eyes that look as if they were inserted into his skull by a taxidermist.  He is a good actor -- a necessity for a practitioner of Lieder (and, indeed, an opera star) -- and, at times, when singing some of the more unheimlich and satirical Hollywood songs (a few feature Dante-esque imagery), he glares at the audience with alarm as if he has just seen a ghost.  He gestures but in a constricted way, holding his short arms close to his belly and gives the impression of an irritated Tyrannosaurus Rex.  There is something wrong with his lower right leg -- he seems to have suffered a severe injury to his ankle and calf and his leg bends inward from the knee:  it looks like an ill-fitted prosthesis or the effect of a motorcycle accident.  One of the songs is about suicide and Goerne embalms the words in sickly self-pity using an uncanny and unearthly falsetto for the word "unbearable":  unertraeglich ("ihr unertraegliches Leben fort" - casting your unbearable life away) -- Goerne twists and distorts the word, tilting it askew with Gesualdo-like quarter-tones, then, he barks out the word fort as loud as he can.  The audience jumped about a foot in the air. The Martin Theater, where the recital was performed, is a comfortable shed with a lofty, rafter-built ceiling.  The singer performs on a small stage in front of the grand piano played by his accompanist.  To the right and left of the stage, there are banks of brightly colored organ pipes -- whether these are functional was unclear to me but they were decorative, garlands of shapely, painted columns.  During the second half of the concert, the house-lights were left on so that the audience could better follow the lyrics in both German and English in a hand-out provided at the door.  A Liederabend is not successful unless the audience can read the words as they are performed and this was possible, even easy, during the second part of the program.