Lydia Teuscher, Graham Johnson deliver lyrical takes on German songs

By Cecelia Porter,

Neither an English air nor French chanson, the German lied of romanticism is a unique kind of song. It owes its origin to the incredible blossoming of German romantic lyric poetry happening at the same time piano technicians were extending the instrument’s capacity for expression. For a Vocal Arts D.C. event, soprano Lydia Teuscher and pianist Graham Johnson joined at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Thursday for an enthralling recital of both familiar and lesser-known lieder by Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Richard Strauss. The success of the long evening owed much to the exquisitely detailed and subtle way the soprano distinguished between the various shades of subjective intimacy and the concentrated emotional impact of single words. And Johnson supported her every distinction, for the romantic lied demands that the piano is assigned as much — sometimes more — an expressive role as the voice.

Johnson prefaced the performance with a thoughtful commentary on the influence of English literature — Shakespeare, Byron, even Sir Walter Scott — on German song texts, although Thursday there were also abundant examples of German poems by Goethe, Friedrich Rueckert and Felix Dahn. In Haydn’s English folksonglike settings, the two musicians bounced between the coy and the playful; Teuscher nimbly managed the music’s frequent swoops between vocal registers and gracefully negotiated curling ornaments. All this was fortified by the pianist’s frisky sorties up and down the keyboard.

With Johnson’s partnership, Teuscher conveyed both Schubert’s bewildering array of emotions, as in the interchanging pathos and ever-accelerating urgency of “An die untergehende Sonne”; while “Ganymed” with its radically changing harmonies, was simply exhilarating. In Schubert’s familiar “Ellens Gesang III,” Teuscher’s intensity and quiet sense of presence left the audience spellbound.

After intermission, samples from Mendelssohn and Schumann brought vaguely heightened levels of emotion that erupted into overwhelming passion in two groups of Strauss songs. Teuscher is the resident artist at Dresden’s Saxon State Opera. Her account of Strauss’s “Maedchenblumen,” Op. 22, and “Drei Lieder der Ophelia” launched into the same angst-tinged, enticing power of his opera “Salome.” Johnson was completely attentive to the versatile soprano’s shift from the earlier composers’ songs of brooding introspection to the operatic insanity of those by Strauss.