Songs From a Swedish Soprano

I have a couple of recommendable discs, one from a soprano, one from a pianist. The soprano is Nina Stemme, and she has made a Strauss CD, with Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. (The label is EMI Classics.)So, who is Nina Stemme? She is a Swedish soprano, well-known in Europe, not terribly well-known in America. Ms. Stemme is now in her mid-40s, and may never have a big American career. But all may enjoy her, or at least assess her, on disc.Her partner on the Strauss CD is an excellent one: Mr. Pappano is simply one of the best conductors going, in music either operatic or symphonic. (He also happens to be a most capable pianist.)The contents of the CD are interesting: We get two final scenes — the one from “Salome” and the one from “Capriccio.” And we get Strauss’s ineffable farewell, “The Four Last Songs.” It is this work, or set, that we will consider here.How does our Swedish songbird do? Well, she is not exactly a songbird – certainly not in the chirpy sense. She has a substantial, solid soprano, and one with a lot of smoke in it. Seldom do you hear such smoke outside of mezzodom. Occasionally, however, she lets some light in. And her sound is always alluring.More important, she sings “The Four Last Songs” with considerable intelligence. She is not afraid of them, by which I mean, she approaches them naturally. She does not approach them as holy music to tremble before, or to tiptoe around. She sings them confidently, and pretty straightforwardly.Now and then, she and Mr. Pappano get a little rhapsodic, for me. But that is far better than preciousness. And their tempos tend to be on the fast side; you might appreciate a little more savoring. But at least they refuse to wallow. In the first two songs, especially, we could use a little more mystery, a little more sublimity — a little more transcendence. Sometimes, when you hear these songs, you could almost float away. But Ms. Stemme and Mr. Pappano keep you rather more earthbound. Still — and here I go with another defense — they avoid a false profundity. They know that Strauss has already built the profundity in.The orchestra plays beautifully and cleanly, and the third song, “Beim Schlafengehen,” contains one of the sweetest violin solos you’ll ever hear. (The violinist is Peter Manning.)In the fourth and final song — “Im Abendrot” — Ms. Stemme sings with extraordinary sensitivity. You could, in fact, float away. This is the effect we want “The Four Last Songs” to achieve.Would you like a bottom line? I myself wouldn’t take this recording of the songs with me to a desert island. But if I were there, and discovered it among my belongings, I wouldn’t be disappointed.* * *The piano disc is a flat-out, 100-percent winner — perhaps even a desert-island disc, if you are a lover of Liszt. Arcadi Volodos, the Russian pianist, plays 10 pieces of the old wizard. (The label is Sony Classical.) And what Mr. Volodos is, is a virtuoso with a brain. That is the best kind of virtuoso to be.The 10 pieces here are not the Liszt you might expect. Mr. Volodos plays contemplative, mystical, religious Liszt. We don’t get the flashiest, most pyrotechnical romps. Instead, we get such pieces as “Il Penseroso,” “Sposalizio,” and the one about St. Francis preaching to the birds. We also get such rarities as the “Bagatelle Without Tonality” and “En rêve – Nocturne.” Liszt wrote this last in the final year of his life, and it is a gentle, dear thing.We also get “La lugubre gondola” No. 2 — and that is, indeed, a lugubrious gondola, surely as lugubrious as the first.And Arcadi Volodos lays all of these pieces out superbly. He has every necessary tool, beginning with a big sound, which, despite its bigness, is not the least harsh, aggressive, or overbearing. It is grand and beautiful. Mr. Volodos seems to pay much attention to sound, and it pays off in this music, extraordinarily.Furthermore, Mr. Volodos is a master of the keyboard, a conqueror of the keyboard. His playing evinces no effort; it is impossibly easy; Mr. Volodos is all confidence. He is a big enough pianist — a world-bestriding enough pianist — to play Liszt. And that is not true of every pianist, even great ones.Interpretively, Mr. Volodos scarcely puts a foot wrong. Every piece is well judged (and, of course, he has the technique to bring off those judgments). This disc is a case of a performer’s complete suitability to the repertoire in question.I have said that there are no fireworks on this disc — no pyrotechnics — but that is not quite true: Mr. Volodos includes his own arrangement of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13. There is a blizzard of notes in the final section of this piece, and that blizzard is mind-boggling. Yet Mr. Volodos is ever musical, the main point of what he is doing. And his arrangement is top-notch.One could go on, but let me close with this: Toward the end of the 2006-07 music season in New York, I said that Louis Lortie, in recital at Carnegie Hall, offered some of the best Liszt playing I had ever heard. It was amazingly beautiful. So is Mr. Volodos’s playing. And his new disc, frankly, is one of the best Liszt albums I know.

Songs From a Swedish Soprano

Songs From a Swedish Soprano

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