Wanderer is a wonderful testament to the enigmatic quality of the high male voice and its increasingly versatile role in contemporary performance. Presented in the style of a Liederabend, the recording features the countertenor Andreas Scholl and pianist Tamar Halperin interpreting an eclectic mix of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century songs – mostly terra incognita for the countertenor voice. In a recent interview with Gramophone, Scholl makes this connection explicit: ‘I'm leaving my “home territory” with lots of this repertoire, and it's sort of “me as wanderer”, journeying through different periods of music’.Footnote ¹

The periods represented on this disc encompass one hundred years of song, providing an overview of the genre's development: Mozart's Das Veilchen (K476, 1785), Haydn's English Canzonettas (published in 1794–95), eight Schubert lieder written between the years 1815 and 1824 and selections from Brahms's collection of forty-nine Volkslieder WoO 33 (published in 1894). The songs are complemented by two pieces for solo piano: Schubert's Waltz in B Minor D. 145 and Brahms's Intermezzo in A Major, op. 118 no. 2. Careful planning went into the selection and placement of these instrumental interludes; for example, the listener will surely hear echoes of Schubert's melancholy Ländler for piano in the song that immediately follows: Im Haine (D. 738), his seductive waltz for the voice. The programming also traces important stylistic developments in the history of German song. The earliest lied, Das Veilchen, is a watershed for its genre. Its through-composed form and dramatic characterization depart from the early, simple aesthetic of the strophic continuo lied. The Haydn canzonettas, however, return to a strophic form, adding the sophisticated pianism found in the composer's sonatas and the mimetic musical language of his oratorios; we also hear the diversions to distant harmonic regions that foreshadow Schubert's later practice. Brahms's late-period folksongs, written during the waning years of the nineteenth century, reinstate a simple lied idiom, as newer developments began to displace it. ‘Song composition is sailing so false a course that one cannot sufficiently remind oneself of an ideal – and that to me is folksong,’ he wrote to Clara Schumann in 1860.Footnote ²

The many lieder on this disc, recorded innumerable times by singers, are given fresh interpretations by Scholl. His effortless, broad phrasing informs his performance of these works, if it deemphasises the precision of German diction that emanates from the earlier traditions of interpreters like Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau in the 1950s and 1960s. Alongside Scholl, Halperin's admirable virtuosity is tempered by her sensitive accompanimental style. Halperin's refined touch and dexterity are especially evident in the three Haydn canzonettas on the disc, Despair, Recollection, and Wanderer, settings of melancholy texts by the poet Anne Hunter (1792–1812). Moments within these remarkably inventive pieces bear an affinity to the pictorial style of the English oratorio tradition, yet essentially, they give primacy to the pianoforte. Haydn's expressive dynamic markings exploit the wide range and robust tone of English fortepianos of the 1790s, while the sophisticated preludes to each canzonetta seem to oppose H.C. Robbins Landon's claim that the works express ‘Haydn's intention to compose technically easy songs that could be … played a prima vista’.Footnote ³ Halperin vividly executes Haydn's tremolando passages, cantilena-style writing and menacing unisono textures while Scholl invokes a wide palette of colours and evocative diction to arouse images from the text: he uses no vibrato to depict the eerie sound of the forest in Wanderer (above tremolando Neapolitan and diminished-seventh harmonies) and conjures a pale tone in the unison passages of Recollection, a fatalistic reminder of time's inevitable passing. Though Haydn's recurring fermatas and range of embellishments call for improvised ornamentation and the unique timbre of the fortepiano for which they were conceived, this modern performance is nevertheless deeply felt and convincing.

While the countertenor still assumed a decisive presence in the eighteenth century, the voice type had fallen out of use by Schubert's time. Instead, Schubert composed frequently for the baritone Johann Michael Vogl and the tenor-baritone Carl Freiherr von Schönstein, whose memoirs recall that ‘[Schubert] admitted to me repeatedly from this time on [1818] in his songs, he generally had in mind a voice of my range’.Footnote ⁴ Nevertheless, Scholl's recording proves that the ethereal tone of his particular voice type is especially suited to express the subdued, religious, even otherworldly nature of three Schubert songs on the disc, all composed after the year mentioned by Schönstein. Scholl's unearthly voice is a beautiful match for the alienated voice of a star in Abendstern (D. 806), a rarely performed gem. The devout atmosphere of Ellens dritter Gesang (D839) – associated with the commonly heard Latin contrafactum, Ave Maria – and Du bist die Ruh (D. 776), a setting of Friedrich Rückert's mystical paean to love, is reinforced by the boyish purity of Scholl's sound and his execution of long, unbroken phrases. At the melodic climax of Du bist die Ruh, a notoriously ecstatic and vocally demanding moment, Scholl resists the temptation to which countless singers have succumbed: to interpret Schubert's accented, forte marking in bars 59 and 70 as a decrescendo. Adhering instead to Walther Dürr's dynamics in the Neue Schubert Ausgabe, Scholl presses through to the climax, and the echo of his voice rings out into space demarcated by Schubert's single bar of rest following the euphoric release of the vocal line.

Scholl's portrayals of multiple personae in Schubert's lieder may strike some listeners as less effective, partly due to the inherent restrictions of volume and tone colour faced more acutely by the countertenor than by other voice types. Scholl is not the only modern countertenor to perform Schubert's setting of Matthias Claudius's poem Der Tod und das Mädchen (D. 531) – in 2000, David Daniels recorded it with pianist Martin Katz – yet he is the first performer to my knowledge to conjure a separate vocal range to personify death, an effect that almost suggests two different singers. To do this, Scholl drops from his natural countertenor voice into a baritone range. But to my ears the effect is empty, missing the vivid characterizations already implied through the oppositions in Schubert's performance indications: death's inevitable tread (mäβig), vs. the anxious palpitations of the maiden's heart (etwas geschwinder), death's firm monotone vs. the maiden's restless repeated quavers. A somewhat quicker, impatient rendering of the maiden's recitativo accompagnato, as heard in the 1961 recording by Christa Ludwig and Gerald Moore, would bring the operatic scena more vividly to life.

Recalling the rustic, naïve roots of the lied, five of Brahms's folksongs (from WoO 33) are a welcome addition to the remaining Schubert lieder on the disc (An Mignon D. 161 and Im Haine D. 738). Scholl subtly interprets these strophic songs with variations in tone for each stanza of the text. Indeed, Gustav Jenner, who studied with Brahms, recalled that his teacher ‘demanded that if the text allowed a treatment in strophes, this was what should be utilized. In order to become clear as to which texts were to be treated in strophes and which were not, he recommended a close study of the complete songs of Franz Schubert, whose acute artistic sense he said was evident even in his most unassuming songs’.Footnote ⁵ By the time Brahms composed and assembled his WoO 33 in the 1890s, he would have fully incorporated Schubert's idiom into his own distinctive late style, rich in rhythmic and contrapuntal complexity and harmonic ambiguity. This is evident in the settings In stiller Nacht (No. 42) and Es ging ein Maidlein zarte (No. 21), whose haunting texts are beautifully depicted by Scholl's uncanny sound. Their texts invoke sacred and secular associations of older sources (Friedrich von Spee's Truz Nachtigall from 1649, a poem about Christ on the Mount of Olives, and a grim variant of the ‘Death and the Maiden’ tale found in Friedrich Nicolai's folksong collection Ein kleyner feyner Almanach, 1777–8), and their melodies are drawn from Brahms's handwritten folksong collections and his most beloved printed source (Kretschmer and Zuccalmaglio's Deutsche Volkslieder, 1838–40). Anything lost in Scholl's performance of Schubert's Der Tod und das Mädchen is amply repaid in a sinister rendering of Es ging ein Maidlein zarte, whose archaic narrative mode (enhanced by Brahms's directive, Gehend und dem Gedicht angemessen erzählend) is interrupted only by the maiden's hesitant plea in the third strophe of the song. Scholl's baritone register makes no appearance; his remarkably unique voice captures and holds our attention, as it does during much of Scholl's musical journey through this impressive and satisfying collection of songs.