Ophelia's Posies - parterre box

There’s something happening at Zankel Hall. Lieder recitals are not what they used to be. Christine Schäfer threw us for a loop Wednesday night in a recital program juxtaposing just two composers – George Crumb and Henry Purcell – who have what, exactly, in common?

Instead of “sets” of songs, the first half of Wednesday’s program was a conceptual shuffle. It was hard to know when to clap (we waited until intermission.) And what about this odd couple? According to the informal and marginally useful “In the Artists’s Own Words” feature in my Carnegie Playbill, Schäfer says that Crumb and Purcell are similarly “melodic” and “theatrical.” That this could be said of most art song, especially the German Lied in which she has excelled, is inconvenient here. If these composers share anything, it is their freedom from the rigorous classicism that informs the language of essentially all composers from 1750 to 1900. But the connection between Crumb and Purcell, it turns out, is perhaps better demonstrated than explained.

Jumping in with Purcell’s “Music for a While,” Schäfer showed a breathy, weak tone in the lower register where this music mostly resides, and she sang with virtually incomprehensible English diction, a problem that plagued the evening. Her gasping shortness of breath suggested she’d just climbed the stairs from the F train on her way to the stage. “If Music Be the Food of Love” followed, with a plausible sense of Purcell’s decorative melody, but imprecise in pitch and somewhat labored. These sounds bore little resemblance to her clarion and confident Sophie in the Met’s Der Rosenkavalier earlier this month.

Schäfer has “no qualms about singing ‘early’ music with piano accompaniment,” she tells us in the program notes. There, that takes care of that! Eric Schnieder’s accompaniments were all too pianistic in his reliance on the sustain pedal, and this foggy sound did no service to Purcell’s thoroughbass accompaniments – except, perhaps, to link them more aptly with the atmospheric, gauzy Crumb songs. Incongruously, in most of the Purcell works Schäfer leaned on tones with affected non-vibrato, and breathed expressively on text that she seemed not to understand. It seemed an imitation of the ubiquitous “performance practice” singing style made popular by early music recordings. Here’s to having your cake and singing it too.

George Crumb’s Three Early Songs were written when the composer was only 17 years old, and are the only of his juvenile works he did not eventually disavow. In “Night,” “Let It Be Forgotten,” and “Wind Elegy” he invokes a dreamy diatonicism that makes more poetry out of simple harmonies than almost any song composer of his time. Schäfer sang these with affection and poise, interspersed among other Purcell works, including the long, free-form ballad “From Rosy Bow’rs.” Hearing this song in the context of this program heightened its genteel love poetry to a kind of Mahlerian aesthetic of oblivion. “Music for a While” was reprised, unprogrammed, to quaintly bookend the first half of the evening.

The second half, consisting of just two works, was more concentratedly satisfying. “Dido’s Lament” from Dido and Aeneas reaffirmed the program’s theme of morbid repose. Though she displayed an surprising lack of presence in the lower-sitting phrases of the aria, her higher “Remember me!” exclamations resounded with a recognizable, effortless gleam. Why didn’t she sing more songs in this easier and more attractive tessitura?

Crumb’s daring yet meandering Apparition, a cycle on texts by Whitman, dazzled the ear with its unique sonorities. The work calls for an array of unusual effects, including rhythmic strumming on the piano’s cords and tapping on its resonant wood panels. Vocalizations of cuckoo songs, suggesting Mahler’s Wunderhorn Lieder, are sung into the innards of the piano for an eerie echo sonority. In its more conventional writing, sumptuous romantic harmonies combine with a Messiaen-like stasis, and there are even suggestions of the Frenchman’s birdsong choruses in the virtuosic piano writing (tackled with messy determination by pianist Eric Schneider.) But while there was a convincing point to be made about the aesthetic bond between these composers of similar doleful grace, it could have been made within a more varied program.

There were encores, but these bonbons were more like dodgy halloween candy – a trick inside a treat. First, there was Alban Berg’s 30-second teaser “Schliesse mir die Augen beide.” Never mind that this early, pleasant tune could have been written by Hugo Wolf – she’ll get crazy street cred singing the Second Viennese School as an encore.

And speaking of clever juxtapositions! Finally there was Webern’s “Dies ist ein Lied,” among the composer’s first in a brave atonal palette and lasting only fifteen seconds. What a surprise to learn that it makes a clever recitative-introduction to Schubert’s Nacht und Träume, which she sang with graceful and haunting poise, finally in a language and idiom that suited her.