Nascent Scenes of Artistry Stir Wigmore Hall: 2024 Wigmore/Bollinger International Song Competition Final Review

A foursome forayed into narrative excursions to transform perceived conventions of recital.

A YouTube Live Stream of yesterday evening’s Final Round of the 2024 Wigmore Hall/Bollinger International Song Competition.

Collapsing the fourth wall, the song recital lives uniquely out of context. Arias hark back to high stakes plots; musicians try out magic tricks. Beseeching, pleading, dreaming heedlessly out loud, the solo vocalist is left unarmed. While poetry recitals are confined to cafés and bohemian haunts, songs channel intimacy in intimidating halls.

Depicting Schubert’s ‘Der Winterabend’ (‘The Winter Evening’), mezzo-soprano Anja Mittermüller opened the Final Round of Wigmore Hall’s 2024 Bollinger International Song Competition. A bell-like timbre tints the singer’s middle register – assisting with voluptuous vibrato on tenacious notes. Too many of these lacked throughout the evening nonetheless. In Schubert’s work the vocalist released ‘unter’s B flat a little fast and finished with a swiftly loosed ‘und sinne’. Crescendi on ‘Da sitz’ ich im Dunkeln, ganz abgeschieden’ (‘I sit in the darkness, quite secluded’) and ‘lässt mich schweigen’ (‘[the moon] leaves me to silence’) came out potently but panicked – straying from a contemplative tone.

Theatricality sustained occasional notes better in Brahms’ ‘Botschaft’ (op. 47 No. 1), which witnessed some dramatic changes in crescendi but a fragile top on the A flat of ‘Eile nicht hinwegzufliehn!’ (‘Make no haste to fly away!’). In Schumann’s ‘Mondnacht’ Mittermüller exercised arresting onomatopoeia in ‘Dass sie im Blütenschimmer’ – rousing her vibrato to reflect the vacillation of a blossom’s gleam. Intermittent instability was palpable nevertheless. Consonants emerged delayed and dim in several of her notes; appearing almost imperceptibly before their expiration. Among these was this song’s at-length dissolving ‘Nacht’ and its last syllable of ‘Haus’, which drifted into nothingness too soon.

Diction intricacies troubled Mittermüller’s rendering of Poulenc’s ‘La Souris’ and ‘Hyde Park’ – most notably in erring vowel sounds of ‘vingt’ (‘twenty’), which the mezzo sang as ‘vent’ (‘wind’), and ‘brouillard’ (‘fog’), which surfaced as ‘bwa-yarr’. Nonetheless the singer tackled frenzied tempi with impressive ease. Rachmaninov’s Romance ‘In the silence of the secret night’ afforded Mittermüller well-held notes in ‘vzor sluchainii’ (‘spontaneous glance’) and her first take on ‘tmu’ (‘darkness’), but led the singer likewise to delay the ‘t’ of ‘prizyvat’ (‘to summon back again’). Lyricism was amiss in this rendition and legato gaunt.

Mahler’s ode to a deliberate obliviousness, ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,’ was treated to a richly placed vibrato in the run of notes along ‘gestorben’ in the first verse but a shaky lower register across it in the second. Though tenderness appeared in patches, it was lacking throughout most of Mittermüller’s executions.

Mystifyingly she won First Prize in this year’s contest.

Treading bars of harmony unhinged, Jonathan Eyers embarked his baritone on Douglas Lilburn’s ‘Holiday Piece’ for his début. Crisp consonants escorted strong vibrato through the work’s accelerated changes – making for exhilarated characterisation. Sanguine emphases remained as Eyers ventured into Schubert’s ‘Hoffnung’. Enhancing words with cheeriness, the baritone came close to overloading certain syllables with an approach too precious: ‘goldenen’ was overstressed while ‘better things’ – ‘Verbesserung’ – emerged with a crescendoed, misplaced ominousness. The Lied’s last line, ‘Das täuscht die hoffende Selle nicht‘ ([‘what the inner voice declares] does not deceive the hopeful soul’) veered on falsetto’s verge.

Crescendi fared much better in the singer’s next work, Sally Beamish’s ‘Nightingale’ from 4 Songs from Hafez. Here a sudden change in volume darkened the split notes of ‘grief’ and eerie pianissimo lent threats to ‘no concern for you’; creating an appreciable presage for the audience.

Vowels lingered in a manner slightly English in Eyers’ undertaking of Debussy’s ‘Colloque sentimental’ from Fêtes galantes Book II – in which the vocalist accentuated subtle elements in forte. ‘Qu’il était bleu, le ciel et grand, l’espoir!’ (‘How blue the sky, how great the hope was!’) morphed into a grand announcement at the sad expense of introspection.

Eyers stitched uneven rhythms seamlessly together in his take on Herbert Howells’ ‘King David’; amplifying his thick middle register to herald augury. Employing moments of parlando in Poulenc’s ‘Avant le cinéma’, the baritone coped well with serial consonants and stubbornly unruly tempi. He did however slip into an unintentional falsetto on ‘Si vous saviez’ in the previous song from 4 poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘L’anguille’.

Gentility stayed absent from the baritone’s dramatic treatment of Medtner’s ‘Heimweh’: ‘Homesickness’. Pondering how nobody ‘has ever found home and the contentment of home’ (‘Heimat und Heimatsglück Wohl keiner je gefunden’), Eyers offered forte notes galore. Vulnerability was loath to make its presence known in his performance.

Enigmatic mounts of volume launched ‘La mer est plus belle’ (‘The sea is more beautiful’) by Debussy: an opening for mezzo Mathilde Ortscheidt. Lavishing the mélodie with a profound contralto timbre, the performer practised gradual diminuendo on ‘Cette immensité n’a rien d’entêté’ (‘There’s nothing stubborn in the sea’s immensity’), and sumptuously drawn-out portamento to describe the ocean’s colours: ‘bleus, roses, gris et verts’ (‘blue, pink, grey and green’).

Liquid sounds emerged in sensual languor on the ‘n’s of ‘orpheline’ (‘orphan’) and ‘décline’ (‘declining’) in her next work, the composer’s ‘Le son du cor’. Unspooling notes elastically in legato, Ortscheidt savoured vowels yet leaned on timely consonants in a sublime embodiment of French impressionism.

Third mélodie Debussy’s ‘L’échelonnement des haies’ encountered tactile symmetry in Ortscheidt’s voice: envisionable mirrors as she sang ‘a curling wave of flute-like bells’ (‘l’onde, roulée en volutes, De cloches comme des flûtes’). Transfixing was this stylised accentuation of hypnotic verse.

The singer’s natural pitch bends served George Crumb’s ‘Wind Elegy’ with terrible presentiments of horror. In Mahler’s ‘Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht,’ the mezzo phrased ‘um meinen lieben Schatz’ (‘my dearest love’, but in relation to the latter’s wedding day) to plumb the depths of dolour. Switching from an intimate cascade to melodrama, Ortscheidt freed crescendo arcs across ‘Blue little flower! Do not wither, do not wither!’ (Blümlein blau! Blümlein blau! Verdorre nicht! Verdorre nicht!) to canvass the mercuriality of love.

Though fractionally unsteady on the Fs of ‘Wird’s nicht eine schöne Welt? Schöne Welt?’ (‘Isn’t it a lovely world, lovely world?’ in Mahler’s ‘Ging heut’ morgen über’s Feld’), Ortscheidt relished the parlando style of modern song ‘La nuit’ from Âme de Nuit by 21^st-century composer Élise Bertrand. Limning life disrobed of light, the singer lent a mystical allure to references of ‘le repos des étoiles confuses’ (‘the sleep of confused stars’), and dropped her syllables with purposeful theatricality on the last line, ‘la semence de feu qui féconde les terres’ (‘the seed of fire that births lands’).

Excellent taste sustained those works and Bernstein’s ‘I Hate Music’ from his titular endeavour. Traveling through several ‘la-di-das’, Ortscheidt coupled enviable legato with an elegant improvisation. Her penchant for experimenting rhythmically grew even more apparent in a presentation of Schoenberg’s ‘Erwartung’: ‘Expectation’. Topping up the potency of her vibrato, Ortscheidt dealt thrilling urgency to ‘Wo ihr dunkles Abbild Durch das Wasser greift’ (‘Where her dark image gleams through the water’). Creepily evolved crescendi patterned the composer’s ‘Schenk mir deinen goldenen Kamm’ (‘Give me your golden comb’) with stalkerish desires.

Creativity seemed penalised in this event, however, as Ortscheidt left with the fourth ‘Special Prize.’

Stepping tentatively into Schumann, tenor Santiago Sánchez – this year’s runner-up – relied on thick vibrato to enhance select words in ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’, rendering ‘Als alle Knospen sprangen’ (‘When all buds were bursting into bloom’) too saccharine. This attitude cost Sánchez pitch, and he concluded the beloved song with noun ‘Verlangen’ – desire – noticeably in falsetto.

‘Aus meinen Tränen spriessen’ met with similar attempts at characterisation: ‘If you love me, child, I’ll give you all the flowers,’ (‘wenn du mich lieb hast, Kindchen, Schenk’ ich dir die Blumen all’) emerged a semi-whisper. In ‘Die Rose, die Lillie, die Taube, die Sonne’ the tenor smoothly rounded off his notes, nevertheless.

Dichterliebe’s final piece, ‘Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’, extended a bombastic ‘So werd ich ganz und gar gesund’ (‘then I am wholly healed’) that seemed at odds with the song’s meditative nature. The slurred semiquaver and quaver of ‘Himmelslust’ were hushed as though in caution.

Crisp diction helped the tenor tailor Richard Strauss’s ‘Nachtgang’: late Romantic bliss. The necessary intimacy was increasingly diminished throughout Sánchez’s next pieces nonetheless: Strauss’s ‘Heimliche Aufforderung’ included well apportioned rhythms but the singer stumbled at the end of ‘let them be happy at the noisy feast’ (‘sie glücklich sein’), where he ran out of breath.

Legato garnered sentiment in Sánchez’s realisations but persistently loud notes were prone to cut it short. These included ‘o fonte o fiume’ (‘O, fountains, O rivers’) in Britten’s Sonetto XXXVIII: ‘Rendete agli occhi miei, o fonte o fiume,’ and strained top notes along ‘celeste lume’ (‘heavenly light’). Vistas storming Michelangelo’s sonnet – upon which this song was based – stayed out of reach in Sánchez’s fortissimo displays. Similar flaws upended the mellifluousness of Sonetto XXIV: ‘Spirto ben nato, in cui si specchia e vede’, whose final words, ‘C’a si bel viso morte non perdoni?’ (‘[What cruel force] could forbid Death to spare such a lovely face?’) finished in falsetto.

Strong vibrato surfaced in Ginastera’s ‘Zamba’ from 5 canciones populares argentinas, sustaining ‘Con lo suyo ha de pagar’ (‘He must return it in kind’) with ostensible flair, but too lengthily. By the advent of Turina’s ‘Rima’ Sánchez had begun to pair his forte bursts; ‘mis ojos’ (‘my eyes’) was delivered with the same panache as ‘en fuego’ (‘with fire’). Showmanship had sadly sacrificed technique.

Sánchez’s accompanist Ian Tindale dappled in delays intrinsic to the melancholy Schumann. Playful with rubato, Juliette Journaux was likewise piquantly experimental as the pianist for Mathilde Ortscheidt. Ilan Kurtser made suspenseful use of pedal to helm Jonathan Eyers’ performance but Anja Mittermüller’s Richard Fu explored the keyboard overcautiously.

Riddled with insightful incarnations of a host of works, the Wigmore Hall/Bollinger International Song Competition proffered peeks into formation rarely on display.

Its judges ranked the evening’s efforts in reverse order of merit.