Simon Keenlyside - Schumann: Dichterliebe / Brahms: Lieder (2009)

Simon Keenlyside has the instrument, the technique, and the intelligence required of great lieder singers. His burnished baritone is large, but he can deploy it with tenderness, as well as power, and he has the flexibility to bring a broad array of colors to the songs' varied moods. This is especially impressive in Schumann's Dichterliebe, where the songs have an emotional arc with an implied narrative, and Keenlyside captures the mercurial shifts with passion and integrity. Even in a song as brief as "Ich grolle nicht," the subtlety of the lover's evolving feelings come across honestly and with precision. His readings are well thought through, with careful attention to the texts and composer's treatment of them, but they also seem viscerally and spontaneously expressive. It's in the overall impression of the Schumann that his gifts shine strongest, but Keenlyside brings the same emotional intelligence, deep feeling, and range of colors to the diverse selection of songs by Brahms that span the composer's career. Some of the standouts include "Verzagen," "Lerchengesang," "An eine Aolsharfe," and "Nachtwandler." Malcolm Martineau provides exceptionally sensitive, supple, and nuanced accompaniments and gives the songs a wonderfully urgent propulsiveness. Sony's sound is clean and warm, and the balance is good.

A small critique: in the Schumann, there is consistently so little space between the songs that the listener sometimes has the sense that, in real time, the singer would barely have a moment to draw a breath from one song to the next. There are places in the cycle where this sense of elision is exactly the right effect, but others where it is not, and no recitalist could keep it up, either technically or emotionally, for 30 minutes with hardly a pause; the engineers should have been more attentive to creating a natural sense of pacing.