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This was one of those occasions when you needed to be there. In 2023, the Park Avenue Armory in New York presented a staging of Schubert’s last collection of songs, Schwanengesang, conceived by the all-star trio of tenor Jonas Kaufmann, accompanist Helmut Deutsch and director Claus Guth.
Adding drama to these songs, and in this venue, does not make an obvious marriage. Unlike Schubert’s earlier song cycles, Schwanengesang is not a real cycle and does not have a narrative. Also the vast Park Avenue Armory is a long way from the intimate salon that Schubert would have expected.
In this live DVD recording Guth’s staging fills the panoramic space. He imagines a traumatised soldier in a huge, dehumanising hospital ward, 60 iron-framed beds arranged in rows. Kaufmann stands apart as the only sentient patient, while nurses and other soldiers silently go about their choreographed regimes.
The loneliness of his experience adds to the intensity — the last song, “Der Doppelgänger”, is strikingly haunting — but devising incident to accompany these inward song settings is hard work. In addition, Kaufmann does too much crooning, and the electronic sounds and maddeningly repeated phrases on the piano that link the songs test one’s patience.
The package also includes an audio CD, which is much more rewarding. Kaufmann and Deutsch prove an impeccable Lieder duo in Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Kerner-Lieder, and there is an extraordinary bonus recording of six songs from Dichterliebe made at the very start of Kaufmann’s career in 1994. Who knew that he ever sounded like that?
★★★☆☆
‘Doppelgänger’ is released by Sony Classical