Eminence squared: Schwanengesang with Holl and Schiff at the Wigmore Hall
Schwanengesang
Robert Holl and András Schiff
Wigmore Hall
L19, £16
13 October 2018
Wigmore page
It felt like venerableness squared at this afternoon’s concert at the Wigmore with the combined gracious presence of Robert Holl and András Schiff. Even the page turner looked venerable. I’ll admit to feeling a touch of scepticism as to whether these eminences might be a teeny bit too grises; but by the third song I had shed my reprehensible ageism, transported by Holl and Schiff’s performance, the beneficiary of decades of engagement with this music.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone sing Schwanengesang in the way Holl sings Schwanengesang. Even illustrious singers well established in their careers seem to treat it as an opportunity to display their technique, to show you how they can engage with the text and also maintain beauty of sound – at least in comparison to Holl. Holl knows this music so well. The text always comes first. He seems almost more of a speaker than a singer, a great and practised rhetorician who just happens to be singing. The sacrifice is sometimes in tone, sometimes in tonality. But the reward, a living engagement with the music, where the Schubert seems to emerge as spontaneous thought, is in every way worth it.
Unsurprisingly, Holl and Schiff are in a kind of supernatural alignment with each other. I say supernatural but of course it comes from the heightened musicality of each, and their deep familiarity with the music and each other. With one exception, Schiff is precisely alert to Holl’s every breath, the two musicians moving together as one entity; every coloration or contour Holl finds is matched and magnified by Schiff in an extraordinary display of textures which nevertheless, as with Holl, finds its spontaneous origin in Schubert.
So what about this exception? Schiff did that thing he sometimes does and really should stop doing: in response to an ill-timed sneeze from someone near the front of the hall Schiff ignored Holl’s intake of breath, lifted his hands from the keyboard, looked out into the audience with an air of wounded incredulity and asked ‘Why?’ in tones that seemed intended to imply barely contained fury – causing, of course, much greater disruption to the piece than the sneezer’s original offence. I’d be wrong to say it ruined the afternoon, but it was certainly a puncture to the air of musical communion which the direct excellence of Holl and Schiff’s performance had engendered. Could we not have had Schiff’s Schubert without the shaming?
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