Over the past 20 years, Nina Stemme has become one of our finest dramatic sopranos. She had already sung numerous lyric and lyric-dramatic roles (think Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro for the former, Puccini’s Tosca for the latter). But voices can develop, and, since the early 2000s, the Swedish singer has been tackling the most formidable soprano heavyweights. Wagner’s Isolde, Puccini’s Turandot, Strauss’s Salome: in these roles and their sisters, Stemme has earned extraordinary acclaim and attracted a committed fanbase – myself among them. I was blown away by her Isolde in New York in 2016. I thrilled to the power of her Brünnhilde in London in 2018.
Such roles inevitably take their toll. In a relatively intimate venue such as London’s Wigmore Hall, voices that can feel colossal even in the vast auditorium at the Metropolitan Opera or at the Royal Opera House have nowhere to hide. This is listening in closeup.
It was therefore especially unfortunate that – aside from his’n’hers velvet concert dress – Stemme and her duo partner, pianist Magnus Svensson, seemed so ill-matched. Where Stemme was as expressively generous as ever and almost unbearably stoical as her voice narrowed and cracked in its upper reaches, Svensson’s playing was ungiving to the point of woodenness: diligent, but without passion.
Their programme brought together two monuments of the late-Romantic song repertory, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, alongside less familiar songs by the Swedish composer Sigurd von Koch and a handful of Kurt Weill numbers.
It took time for Stemme to settle. The dark, covered richness of her lower register was still a visceral delight (albeit one now disconnected from the rest of her voice), as was her crystalline enunciation of the German texts. Would that Svensson’s pedalling had achieved such clarity. His brief solo turn with Liszt’s transcription of Wagner’s Am stillen Herd was desperately in need of direction. In Mahler’s devastating Kindertotenlieder, Svensson’s add-nothing approach was effective in the heartbreakingly empty opening, but couldn’t substitute for interpretation across the cycle. Wild applause followed regardless. Alas, it was the audible battle scars of Stemme’s voice that moved me most.
