‘Cities of Song” may be the theme of this year’s Oxford international song festival, but just as it has been since the annual event began as the Oxford Lieder festival 22 years ago, the songs of Schubert remain its point of reference. To underline that centrality the first evening concert, given in the superb Olivier Hall at St Edward’s School, was a performance by the baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Natalie Burch of Schubert’s final collection, Schwanengesang.
Williams communicates so easily and naturally with his audience that everything he delivers is vivid and compelling. He and Burch stuck to the conventional ordering of these heterogeneous songs, placing the settings of Rellstab’s verse before the bleaker and starker Heine numbers, and ending with the more relaxed Die Taubenpost, to a poem by Seidl. Though his sound has darkened over the years, Williams’s tone still seemed more suited to the Rellstab sequence, and he was at his most conversationally persuasive in Ständchen and the Abschied that ends that group, while there were moments in the Heine songs in which, for all the dramatic intensity that he brought to Der Atlas or Der Doppelgänger, a darker, more incisive sound might have been more appropriate.
