The all-German recital delivered at New York City's Carnegie Hall by Dutch-born soprano Elly Ameling on the second of April held no surprises. Elly Ameling is as dependable artist. She is always good.
Miss Ameling, who has been called today's foremost female lieder and concert singer, performed a two-hour program consisting exclusively of musical settings of the poverty of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to the exceptional piano accompaniment of Rudolf Jansen, before a near-capacity crowd.
Elly Ameling is clearly a recitalist before she is anything else. While this recital was characterized by a lesser degree of dramatic involvement than the recitals of many who sing primarily opera--and interpret their materials more broadly and theatrically--her realization of her material was always sure, tasteful, and to the mark, a satisfying aesthetic experience.
The prolific Goethe, of course, impelled a great many romantic composers into the fires of creation, so many that, notwithstanding the restrictions imposed upon the program by assembling it around musical settings of the work of this single writer, there was a great breadth of variety.
The nine programmed composers included Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Loewe, Schumann, Wolf, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Liszt. Tchaikovsky showed up in an encore.
Consistently notable in Miss Ameling's work is the uncommon degree of control her finely developed craft enables her to exercise over her material, as well as the emotional conservatism characteristic of her northern European musical heritage. Both attributes make her supremely suited to providing authentic, deep-rooted interpretations of Beethoven or Mozart.
Beethoven began the program. Miss Ameling performed his pastoral "Mailed" (May Song) and "Wonne der Wehmut" (Bliss of Sadness) with a good deal of grace and with the unmistakable depth of feeling for the poetry and the language that is clearly born of long experience.
It is often observed of singers that, being less accustomed than instrumentalists to performing in large ensembles, they may demonstrate a lesser grasp of certain of the components of musical impact: that while of course they must have command of pitch and rhythmic elements, many get by without the kind of feeling for phrase and harmony that is requisite for an orchestral musician. But this reviewer has not heard any clearer evidence of harmonic sensitivity from any musician than the lightness of touch Miss Ameling employed in alighting on the final word of the phrase "Tranen unglucklicher Liebe! (Tears of unhappy love!) on the first of the repeated executions of this final line of "Wonne der Wehmut." Miss Ameling's feeling for meaning within the deceptive cadence at that point made it clear that her popularity has something to do with her highly polished sensitivity to what goes on in the music.
Another dependable resource Elly Ameling has is a tone quality that she has practiced, over the years, into an extraordinary consistency. The sound is always clear and focused, in any register, and remained so throughout Mozart's whimsical setting of "Das Veilchen" (The Violet), a poetical-musical whimsy, mockingly reflective, about a
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