Watching how acclaimed young opera singers adapt to the more intimate and nuanced business of delivering lieder is always fascinating. The Croatian soprano Renata Pokupic excited the critics, me included, when she sang a minor role in Tamerlano at the Royal Opera. In fact she was the best thing in a woeful show. And at the Wigmore she once again revealed the qualities that could take her to the top.
Her voice has a Ferrier-like sonority, yet with a seductive husk. It is superbly even-toned from top to bottom. She slipped slightly below pitch in Fauré’s Le secret, but on the whole keeps good control. And she projects each song’s miniature emotional world effectively, yet without effusive gush. Though her English diction wasn’t quite up there with Dame Judi Dench, she captured perfectly the poignant joyousness of Yeats’s The Secrets of the Old in Samuel Barber’s beautiful setting. And I loved the way that she and the pianist Roger Vignoles phrased four Fauré Mélodies: respecting their reticence, delicacy and grace rather than loading them with heavy-duty emotions. Although she fluffed one final top note, she brought a similarly noble restraint to Schumann’s dark settings of poems supposedly written by Mary, Queen of Scots.
But the recital took a while to catch fire, and it wasn’t hard to work out why. Pokupic shared it with the American tenor Alek Shrader. He has had a glowing press in the US, but struck me as being vocally patchy, especially high up. When the voice is soft there’s quite a distracting, almost quavery vibrato; yet when he lets it ring, as in Rossini’s La danza, it becomes very hard-edged.
He, too, is engaging on the platform, characterising the wry, enigmatic terseness of Barber’s Solitary Hotel ably enough, without quite conveying the baffled exasperation that Gerald Finley injects into this stunning Joyce setting. Clearly he will have a good career in Mozart and Rossini operas. But when scrutinised under the microscope in the testing song repertoire Shrader still sounds like a novice.