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Tenor Ian Bostridge opens Spivey Hall season
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake. Sunday at Spivey Hall, in Morrow. www.spiveyhall.org.
Spivey Hall opened its 15th season with a couple of English guys dressed as undertakers, performing songs written by a kid in his 20s.
A song called “Abendbilder” (“Nocturne”) is about how the approaching evening stirs thoughts of mortality. The music is lovely but also a bit morbid. The gentle vocal line is backed by ripples evoking the breeze through trees. In a section about ravens and nightingales, the song reaches a sort of desperate ecstasy. It was the first time I’d ever heard the song, and before it was over realized I might never ever again hear such tenderly affecting music making.
That once-in-a-lifetime reaction has become typical when tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake take the stage. On Sunday afternoon they offered 20 songs by Franz Schubert, who died at 31 and left an unmatched catalog of some 600 songs.
Bostridge and Drake — they operate as a symbiotic pair — grouped the songs to create their own themes. These included paradoxical or intertwined ideas on love, self-doubt, the changing seasons and man’s tiny role in the cosmos. Many songs were about the uncorrupted nature of fish or the fisherman’s troubled thoughts as he waits for a tug on his line.
“Der liebliche Stern” (“The Lovely Star”) touches on the echt-Romantic notion that only death can release you from the torment of lost love. An intense performer, Bostridge’s concentration was complete. At times I’d glance up from the translated texts in the program to see his fists clenched and neck muscles bulging — not melodramatic acting but an ego-less sense that he’d been possessed by the narrator’s spirit.
Bostridge’s interpretations have always been insightful, personal. The voice has grown darker and more mature in recent years. It’s beautiful in an unconventional way, a bit raw, or rather unvarnished and “green” like a slender tree branch striped of its bark.
For encores, they offered first “Heidenroslein” (“Wild Rose”), among the more poppish songs in Schubert’s catalogue, and then “Wie Ulfru fischt,” another tale of a sad and probably love-lorn fisherman who envies the safety of his prey’s watery domain.
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