THE Wigmore Hall has been pushing the boat out for Karol Szymanowski: three afternoon study sessions and five concerts featuring his music. Yet this most important and colourful of prewar Polish composers has remained a connoisseur’s delight. So, for all her excellence, solid track record in East European song, and her CBE, even Joan Rodgers could not summon a full house.
Her recital with the young pianist Christopher Glynn had beauties and insights in plenty, but it also laid out some of the evidence for Szymanowski’s relatively restricted following. The programme paired him with songs by Tchaikovsky of openly emotional appeal; Szymanowski’s songs refracted their folk tales and moody blues through a range of styles that often seemed to operate as a mask.
The Buntelieder of 1910 gave us Szymanowski the quasi-German, sinking himself in the chromatic bog, at its most Strauss-like in Das hat die Sommernacht getan. By the time of the Word Songs in 1921, he’d become more Polish, more angular and spare.
Settings of Joyce’s Chamber Music, later in the 1920s, finally uncovered the mature composer: influences fused, responses alert, sad lyricism abundant.
Rodgers’s middle-weight, slightly veiled soprano, admirably fluid and poised, sensitively traversed this varied terrain, though more acting in voice and gesture could have usefully sharpened the songs’ profiles. On balance, we also needed extra assertion and less dappled charm from Glynn, winner of the 2003 Gerald Moore Award; he’s a very promising accompanist, nonetheless.
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With Szymanowski shifting his feet, it was left to reliable Tchaikovsky to stand firm and help this recital take flight. The waltzing fragrance of At the Ball and the Frenchified lilt of Rondel showered us especially with melodic charms; others, such as Was I Not a Little Blade of Grass, spun searing tales of woe.
Rodgers was ready for either mode. True, singers with larger voices, Russian-born or not, might invest this repertoire with greater decibels and ethnic clamour. Yet Rodgers never lacks punch when it really matters, as several devastating climaxes proved. And her subtlety, ease with the language and gift of imagination make her a very welcome guide to the repertoire. Hard to fall totally spellbound, however, on a hot night among empty seats.