THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019 79
gence to a famous group of songs that
too often fall victim to the high-minded
clichés of the vocal-recital circuit.
“Dichterliebe” is usually sung by men.
Bullock’s fearless negotiation of this
territory deepened the sense that her
onstage character was an exile, an out-
sider. The performance was also a tour
de force of stamina: Bullock sang for
eighty minutes, with relatively brief
breaks, and even when she was silent
she was in constant motion onstage.
Unfortunately, the project suffered
from a severe formal imbalance, with
“Dichterliebe” dominating the first half
and Foccroulle’s settings of Crimp tak-
ing over in the second half. As long as
Schumann was in command, the pro-
duction proved murkily compelling.
The singer was shown in a quick-chang-
ing montage: giving a posh recital,
being pushed around by well-dressed
men, being interrogated, becoming
pregnant, raising a child, and so on.
As she performed “Ich grolle nicht,”
Schumann’s song of forbearance (“I
bear no grudge”), two men watched
her from the sides: her tense grip on
the piano subtly signalled the psychol-
ogy of exile. Foccroulle’s music, couched
in a limber atonal idiom, suggested
those eerie moments in dreams when
one becomes half aware that one is
dreaming. Cédric Tiberghien, at the
piano, handled the transitions with
seamless agility.
When the Schumann stopped,
though, the evening passed from the
imponderable to the interminable.
Mitchell’s penchant for spasmodic ac-
tivity—nonspeaking actors marching
on and off stage, carrying chairs, lamps,
flowers, display cases, and other props—
had me writing rude things in my note-
book. Foccroulle’s songs were beauti-
fully crafted but somewhat lacking in
personality. To be sure, the task of fash-
ioning a sequel to “Dichterliebe” would
have been arduous for any composer.
Perhaps “Zauberland” could be reworked
so that Foccroulle’s settings are more
evenly distributed alongside Schumann’s
stations of the emotional cross.T
he previous night, at Alice Tully
Hall, White Light presented a
more outwardly conventional event:
the baritone Christian Gerhaher and
the pianist Gerold Huber performing
songs by Gustav Mahler. The only in-
novation here was the introduction of
a service called Yondr, which asks con-
certgoers to place their cell phones in
sealed pouches. I opted out, skeptical
that yet another vowel-deficient Sili-
con Valley company could solve prob-
lems created by other Silicon Valley
companies. Indeed, a phone went off
after a few minutes. When human be-
ings gather, disturbances are inevita-
ble. The answer lies not in trying to
control the environment but in culti-
vating experiences that push distrac-
tions to the side.
Gerhaher is the type of performer
who makes such experiences routine.
In the past decade, he has assumed a
preëminent position among Ger-
man-speaking lieder singers and be-
come the rightful heir to the almighty
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Gerhaher
possesses a singular vocal style in which
the veneer of classical refinement pe-
riodically gives way to the world-weary
rasp of the balladeer or the arch charm
of the crooner. He has a way of con-THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2019 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
VOLUME XCV, NO. 36, November 18, 2019. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for four combined issues: February 18 & 25, June 10 & 17, July 8 & 15, and
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veying raw emotion with a tinge of
ironic detachment—a self-aware Ro-
mantic manner that makes him pe-
culiarly suited to Mahler’s intricately
multilayered songs.
This recital felt like a trap prepared
for the kind of listener who was ex-
pecting a couple of hours of comfort-
able cultivation. One of Gerhaher’s sig-
nature techniques is to vary the timbre
and articulation of a repeating word or
phrase so that a familiar pattern be-
comes unsettling. In “Die zwei blauen
Augen von meinem Schatz,” from “Lie-
der eines fahrenden Gesellen,” the sing-
er’s insistence that “all, all was well
again/ Ach, all well again” undermined
itself through a slurring together of
“alles, alles,” until it became a repressed
wail. In “Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer,”
from the same cycle, cries of “O weh!”
became progressively more desperate.
And in the final song of “Kindertoten-
lieder,” reiterations of “In diesem Wet-
ter” (“In this weather”) captured the
self-castigation of a parent who has let
his children out in a storm.
Gerhaher’s uncanny ability to con-
jure images in the mind’s eye—you
could see the suicidal lover, the doomed
young soldier, the missing children—
made me reflect on the latter-day pres-
sure to make concerts more relevant,
more visual, more technologically adept.
I found myself wishing that Bullock’s
masterly rendition of “Dichterliebe”
had been granted the same unadorned
treatment. Yet White Light still de-
serves praise for its restless, exploratory
spirit, its refusal to lock itself into a
single approach. Neither event kept the
world at bay: these places of refuge
were full of wounded souls.