Classical review: Anne Schwanewilms and Malcolm Martineau, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

GERMAN soprano Anne Schwanewilms started off as a mezzo, and from her beautifully delivered but slightly unengaging Queen’s Hall recital, you could tell.

Anne Schwanewilms and Malcolm Martineau

Queen’s Hall

Star rating: * * * *

She was far stronger and clearer in her lower vocal register, characterising Debussy’s luscious (and generally low-lying) Proses lyriques vividly, for example, with a sweetness of tone that could suddenly evaporate into a breathy nothingness, and a warm, narrow vibrato. But in the set of intense songs by Wolf that followed, her voice tended to take on something of a white, featureless tone in her higher range.

And in conveying the meaning and emotion of her often dramatic songs, her voice was everything. For someone to used to the opera stage, it seemed to take until the recital’s second half for her to relax and begin to embody these miniature dramas – although when she did, it was spellbinding. She turned Richard Strauss’s ‘Ach, was Kummer, Qual und Schmerzen’, with its humming interjections concealing a spurned love, into a compelling opera scena, and her three closing fairytale songs by Wolf were thrilling.

Edinburgh-born pianist Malcolm Martineau was a strong but unobtrusive presence, clearly enjoying his moments in the limelight in Wolf’s sometimes flashy piano writing, but delivering playing of luminous subtlety throughout.