Der Lindberghflug was preceded by a set of seven of Weill’s American theater songs that I hope will be repeated when the Cantata Singers perform a “Kurt Weill Cabaret” at another outlying venue, the Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, in Newton on April 6. The Boston premiere of Weill & Brecht’s brief 1929 “workers’ chorus,” Die Legende vom toten Soldaten (“The Legend of the Dead Soldier”), will be given November 9 at the Cantata Singers’ more familiar home base, Jordan Hall, on a program with Luigi Dallapiccola’s 1941 Canti di prigionia (“Prisoners’ Songs”) and Carl Orff’s 1937 (and still popular) Carmina Burana.
Richard Conrad’s the Bostonians presented an ambitious concert of Mahler songs at MIT’s small Killian Hall that deserved a larger audience than the 40 or so people it got. Two wonderful singers, mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler, who now teaches at the New England Conservatory, and popular Boston baritone Philip Lima alternated in three song cycles and joined forces in selections from Mahler’s settings of folk poems, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”). John Greer, the head of NEC’s Opera Department, accompanied Ziegler; Lima’s collaborator was long-time Bostonians pianist William Merrill.
Lima is an imposing figure — well over six feet tall — whose voice didn’t always used to match his stature. But it’s been growing and blossoming and has acquired power. He opened the program with Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”), which some Mahler aficionados have regarded as an uncanny premonition of the death of Mahler’s own daughter, though Mahler wasn’t even married yet when he started on Friedrich Rückert’s poems about the loss of his own children. Lima sang with imposing tone and dignified restraint, but there’s more variety in this cycle than he, or his stiff body language, suggested. With his arms stuck to his side, he delivered all five songs in a state of near-catatonic grief. Yet the songs veer between the misguided joy of self-deception and the bitter irony of realizing the truth, and the cycle ends with a sense of unearthly peace and spiritual consolation. Lima’s musical phrasing seemed to reflect his physical inflexibility.
In Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (“Songs of a Wayfarer”), Ziegler was the more complete and communicative artist. Although it took her voice a while to open up, she moved freely; her phrasing and body language confided every emotional nuance in this tragic (yet gorgeous) depiction of a broken romance. She was inviting the audience to share her story.
The two pianists had their work cut out to make everyone forget Mahler’s evocative orchestral versions. I found Greer more fluid than Merrill, who can sound like an entire orchestra when he’s accompanying an opera but here was more broadly operatic than indrawing and intimate.
After intermission, Ziegler’s voice was prettier, more floated, in three of Mahler’s ravishing unconnected settings of Rückert poems. And Lima became a livelier presence. Physically looser and smiling, he seemed to be enjoying the joke of the satirical “Lob des hohen Verstands” (“In praise of lofty intellect” — a satire about the donkey who awards the singing prize to the cuckoo rather than the nightingale); then in “Der Tambourg’sell” he morphed into the ghostly drummer boy marching to his own execution, with Merrill’s piano vividly providing the shuddering “drumbeats.” You couldn’t have predicted from Kindertotenlieder that Lima was such a good actor.
Ziegler was at her best conveying the desperation of the starving child in “Das Irdische Leben” (“Earthly Life”) and the spiritual ecstasy of the great “Urlicht” (“Primal Light”). And together, Ziegler and Lima were the hilariously mismatched and frustrated would-be lovers of “Verlor’ne Müh!” (“Wasted Effort!”) and “Trost im Unglück” (“Comfort in Misfortune”).
