Until just a moment ago I was watching Schubert’s song cycle “Die schöne Müllerin” performed by British German Lieder singer Ian Bostridge and Mitsuko Uchida (piano) on NHK BS Hi-Vision. It was recorded at Suntory Hall in March 2004, so this was a rebroadcast of something nearly three years old, but I was seeing it for the first time. When you’re shown something like this just as you’re about to go to bed, there’s no way you can sleep…
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Watching these two in close-up on a large HD screen is, in a sense, quite an experience. I’ve always enjoyed Mitsuko Uchida’s expressions — at the Berlin Philharmonic Silvester Concert and elsewhere — but Bostridge’s facial theatrics are on another level entirely, and frankly rather unsettling. Singers — vocalists, that is — tend as a rule to be on the larger side, but Bostridge is the complete opposite: a gaunt, spindly figure, with a hollow, uncanny expression as though he’d just escaped from some dubious institution. Head tilted slightly downward to the left, glaring ahead, face contorting, occasionally twisting his mouth — leaning against the piano, turning his back, wandering constantly left and right. What can one say — it’s like encountering the Addams Family in real life. Less the fair maid of the mill, more a witch haunting some eerie mansion.
When you listen to his voice alone in a recording you don’t notice it, but seeing him on screen, the sheer stage impact is astonishing. The audience members sitting near the front at a live concert must have been inwardly terrified. Far from the broad, unhurried ease one might expect of a singer, he pours every fibre of his being into the philosophical interior of the music and the text — the result is a grippingly tense, clear, pellucid, and lean (yet remarkably carrying) voice, the kind that makes you hold your breath wondering when the taut wire will finally snap, and that leaves you genuinely worried he might simply collapse and die the moment the performance ends. Hot yet cool, cool yet hot. His single-minded, all-consuming concentration pulls you so deeply into his singing that by the end my head was aching, and I, merely watching, was quite exhausted — yet for a performance of this stature, when it was over the audience could not bring themselves to applaud into the silence. Ten seconds passed… a few people began to clap, but Bostridge stood motionless, still staring fixedly ahead. Only when Mitsuko Uchida moved did everyone finally applaud.
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Ian Bostridge holds an Oxford doctorate specialising in the study of witchcraft in medieval history, and is an unusual figure in that he taught himself tenor singing from past the age of thirty — yet the way he strips away every pretence and sings with his entire being in a state of absolute concentration is genuinely soul-stirring to witness. Truly remarkable — extraordinary, even — and his musical magnetism is such that even someone like me, who knows little of German Lieder beyond Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, was utterly captivated in an instant. This is a recommendation in every sense. If there is ever a rebroadcast, I would urge everyone to watch it.
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Re-Listening to Ian Bostridge’s “Die Schöne Müllerin” on CD
I compared two CD albums of the same work: one released on EMI Classics in 2003, recorded on the same occasion as the Suntory Hall live broadcast, and one recorded for the British label Hyperion in 1995 — approximately ten years earlier, when Ian Bostridge had only just made his debut and was barely past thirty.
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The piano accompaniment on the Hyperion disc is by Graham Johnson. The EMI disc, as in the live broadcast, features Mitsuko Uchida’s richly intense — at times almost grotesquely resonant — piano playing from the very opening, conveying the young man’s death-haunted, obsessive ardour, and Bostridge matches her with an eccentric, high-tension vocal style that refuses to be overshadowed. The Hyperion recording, by contrast, presents the young man’s beautiful mill journey in a manner that, while slender and delicate, delivers Schubert’s melodies with straightforward sincerity — a very fine performance in its own right. Guest readings by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau are also interspersed at various points, which is a rare treat. In terms of overall musical richness, including the piano, the EMI disc has the edge; but personally, for the sheer freshness and beauty inherent in Schubert’s own writing — the loveliness of the sound, the sense of colour — I find it is the Hyperion disc that lets one enjoy those qualities most directly.
Ian Bostridge has also released a third recording of “Die schöne Müllerin” in 2020, on the PENTATONE label. This is a live recording from Wigmore Hall, London, in April 2019, with pianist Saskia Giorgini. Judging from what I’ve heard on Spotify, the recording quality is good, and it seems fair to call this a highly accomplished performance — Bostridge’s expressive dynamism greater and deeper than ever, with a palpable sense of mature confidence.
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