Mischa Maisky, Pavel Gililov - Brahms: Songs without Words (1997)

Although the profound soul-stirring that sits at the very core of the Sapphische Ode only partially translates to a solo cello, Brahms’s skill as the mellowest of melodists and Mischa Maisky’s warming sound palette still manage to convey some of its poetic essence. My main problem here is not with the transcriptions – most of them work rather well – or, indeed, with Maisky’s tone, but with a manner of phrasing that is too ‘clean’ for what should be a soaring top line. If you turn to Pierre Fournier’s 1942 recording of Brahms’s song Feldeinsamkeit for comparison (an uncredited transcription included as part of EMI’s “Les introuvables de Pierre Fournier”) you will notice how a judicious and subtle use of portamento lifts the leading melody back on to a vocal plane. Maisky himself recalls various past masters in DG’s booklet, but time and again I felt that his all-too-formulaic shifts from note to note were inhibiting the kind of singing quality that a more pronounced slide would have achieved almost as a matter of course. No degree of graded vibrato (a Maisky speciality) has quite the same effect.
Needless to say, all the greatest Lieder singers – I am thinking especially of Kipnis, Erb, Schumann, Lehmann, Husch and Fischer-Dieskau – employed varieties of portamento to highly musical effect. Best here, perhaps, are the delicate Lerchengesang and Liebestreu, each approximating treasurable short movements from a larger piece; but elsewhere the switch from voice to bow ideally demands rather more in the way of phrasal and inflexional variety than Maisky has on offer. Clean, sonorous projection works far better in Paul Klengel’s useful transcription of the G major Violin Sonata, save that some awkward octave transpositions and a ruinous shift from soloist to piano at 7'09'' into the Adagio (one of the most mysterious passages in the Sonata, especially when the violinist holds the top line) rather spoil the effect. Otherwise, this CD is a pleasant, somewhat monotonous ‘mood setter’ that suggests more interpretative potential than it actually realizes. Pavel Gililov provides well-characterized accompaniments and the recordings are excellent.'