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Christina Landshamer’s song recital on Oehms has two short cycles by Austrian composer Viktor Ullmann (1898 – 1944) embedded in selected Robert Schumann songs. You could take the CD as a business card of Christina Landshamer’s, a young and fast-rising all-purpose soprano from Munich, presenting a bit of the conventional with Schumann alongside the unusual with Ullmann (fair enough) and celebrating her youthful, neutral, natural voice – channeled and slightly accelerated through an artificial narrowness – in the process.
The disc would undoubtedly have plenty merits just on that count. But my interest is in the Ullmann songs and how the Schumann helps to make the former appear in a good light. The Ullman-inclusion could be due to a general renaissance of this very long overlooked, very fine composer. But if one knows that one of the earliest and most active champions and pioneers of Ullmann’s music, the pianist and pedagogue Konrad Richter (first to record the Ullmann piano sonatas and the piano concerto) was also Christina Landshamer’s teacher, some well-intentioned steering seems likely. Well steered, because Ullmann fashioned an ingratiating style of 20th-century modernism (his hero and one-time teacher was Arnold Schoenberg) rooted in the romanticism of Mahler and Zemlinsky (the latter his one-time boss at the German opera in Prague). His 3 Sonnets, op.29 on poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (set in German) and 6 Sonnets, op.34 on texts by Louise Labe (set in melodically idiomatic French) are a testament of that ability to cleave superficially opposing styles and forge a pleasant third way from them.
I find that it’s better to judge the disc in that latter way. Despite the terrific contributions of the best Lied-pianist of our time, Gerold Huber (congenial half of the GerhaherHuber duo), the Schumann is ultimately too pretty and a shade too meaningless to rise to the level of the very best in Schumann singing. The Ullmann, however, is infused with greater drama and attention to the text… and makes this a fine choice CD of the Week, with more Ullmann yet to come early next year. Last minor quibble: The liner notes feature an interview that feels vaguely air-brushed; something less calculated – or an essay – might have been more entertaining and informative.
(Video below in German.)
