At a Brighton Festival a year or two back, Mark Padmore sang Schubert’s Schwangesang (Swan Song) at a lunchtime concert in the Pavilion Theatre, which makes for an interesting comparison with last Sunday’s performance of Schubert’s last and greatest songs.
Matthew Rose had the advantage of the incomparable setting of the Music Room which is almost exactly contemporaneous to this music and a beautiful venue for any song recital. He also has a fine rich bass-baritone voice which well suited the numerous dark and sombre settings in his programme. In Malcolm Martineau there was an experienced accompanist with interpretative insight and the requisite technique.
Where Padmore scored over his younger rival was in maturity. Both singers experienced intensely the drama, but Rose, at this stage of his career as a lieder singer, is still inhibited and tense on the concert platform as he would not be on the operatic stage. Consequently, he found it difficult to relax in some of Schubert’s greatest charmers like Ständchen or the final Die Taubenpost, his very last song which, though profound, seems light-hearted after the horrific trauma of Der Doppelganger.
A bonus was a first half with two contrasting groups; three of Schubert’s jolly parodies of Italian Opera where the singer was very much at home, and Brahms’ 4 Serious Songs. Their positively gloomy message, settings of Biblical texts mainly about death, was very much relished by Rose, evidently a serious and dedicated artist, which he needs to be in this most challenging repertoire.
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