FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 – 1828), JOHN LENNON (1940 – 1980), SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY (born 1942), and GEORGE HARRISON (1943 – 2001): Schubert/Beatles — Theo Hoffman, baritone; Julia Bullock, soprano; Andrew Owens, tenor; Rupert Boyd and Alex Levine, guitar; Rubén Rengel, violin; Sam Weber, bass; Steven Blier and Kunal Lahiry, piano; New York Festival of Song [Recorded at Big Orange Sheep, Brooklyn, New York, USA, 23 – 27 April and 16 July 2024, and at Second Take Sound, New York City, USA, 10 September 2024; NYFOS Records 838999; 1 CD, 56:33; Available from New York Festival of Song Records and major music retailers and streaming services]
4 May 1856. 9 February 1964. These dates are of little consequence in the broadest historical context, but their significance to music lovers is enormous and enduring. On 4 May 1856, a Viennese audience heard the first known complete performance of Franz Schubert’s Liederzyklus Die schöne Müllerin, completed in 1823 but not sung publicly in its entirely until nearly three decades after the composer’s death. On the inauspicious Sunday evening of 9 February 1964, American television viewers were introduced to The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show—a cultural milestone with few equivalents in the annals of Western music. The chasm that might seem to separate these two events, temporally and stylistically, is bridged by the melodic fecundity and mastery of word setting shared by Schubert, John Lennon, and Sir Paul McCartney. In a sense, these performances were very different manifestations of a timeless, universal artistic spirit, singular but closely-connected steps along a long and winding musical road.
Motivated in part by the musical foundation upon which the band and their frequent producer Sir George Martin built their body of work, the inclination to analyze The Beatles’ songs from the perspectives of and perform them with aesthetics borrowed from traditional Classical Music has intensified in the years since the 1991 première of McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio codified the links between Classical idioms and The Beatles’s Blues-influenced Rock language. Bringing avant-garde points of view and innovative interpretive nuances to Art Song repertory, not least by recalibrating audiences’ perceptions of the genre’s conventions, is a core focus of New York Festival of Song’s endeavors, one of the most remarkable of which—first in performance and now on disc—is the partnering of Schubert Lieder with Beatles songs that explore related themes. In the fifty-six minutes of Schubert/Beatles, recorded with aural clarity and an appealing suggestion of an intimate performance space, the gravity of the societal metamorphoses that divide Schubert, The Beatles, and Twenty-First-Century listeners is lightened, commonality found not in familiarity but in undeviating—and all-too-rare—artistic integrity.
Guided by NYFOS co-founder and Artistic Director Steven Blier, the artistic collaborations that yield the thoughtful, thought-provoking performances on Schubert/Beatles are at once reverent and rebellious, combining meticulous preparation and stylistic acumen with originality and spontaneity. It is always hoped that new generations of interpreters of music as emotionally layered as Scubert Lieder and Beatles songs will bring unique insights to their explorations of these works, but lackluster accounts of Winterreise and pedestrian covers of Lennon and McCartney standards have reduced the notion of distinctiveness to a cliché. This is a project that rewards optimism, however. Blier and fellow collaborative pianist Kunal Lahiry play with technical accomplishment that is too easily neglected whilst listening to this disc, the unfettered exuberance of their scene-setting outshining the virtuosity that facilitates it.
The salons of Schubert’s Vienna perhaps exhibited few similarities with Liverpool’s legendary Cavern Club, but they are here linked by Blier, Lahiry, and guitarists Rupert Boyd and Alex Levine as irrevocably and captivatingly as was the Gershwins’ New York with DuBose Heyward’s Catfish Row. In the context of these musicians’ contributions to this disc, along with those of violinist Rubén Rengel and bassist Sam Weber, it can be asserted that consistency is the enemy of critique: so uniformly energizing, illuminating, and musically expert are their performances that praising any individual phrase or piece as superior to its companions would be disingenuous.
Few segments of the Art Song repertoire have amassed discographies as expansive as that of which Schubert’s Lieder can boast. A boon to listeners, this abundance tasks interpreters whose performances of Schubert Lieder are committed to disc with justifying their presence among accounts by storied artists. In the opening phrases of ‘Die Taubenpost’ (D.965A), delivered with a heartening avoidance of artifice, baritone Theo Hoffman answers the question of whether he is a Schubertian whose work merits recorded documentation with a resounding ‘Jawohl.’ Here and in all of the Schubert Lieder sung on this disc, Hoffman’s timbre is reminiscent of that of Gérard Souzay, the silvery lower octave integrated with a shimmering, soft-grained upper register, but the younger singer shapes literary and musical phrases with markedly greater sincerity than his predecessor often employed.
As sung in this recital, Friedrich Rochlitz’s words are granted clarity equal to that devoted to Schubert’s music in ‘Alinde' (D.904). Hoffman enunciates the line ‘Noch will sie nicht kommen’ with particular psychological ardor, heightening the anguish of the sentiment without distorting the musical line. Similarly, the words ‘Weit, hoch, herrlich’ from Goethe’s text ideally characterize Hoffman’s voicing of ‘An Schwager Kronos’ (D.369), his vivid but unexaggerated declamation differentiating the transitions of mood among the stanzas. His singing teems with drama, but it is always discernibly that of the song’s narrator.
Despite his unsurpassed affinity for melodic bounty, Schubert did not achieve lasting success with opera, his music for Alfonso und Estrella and Fierrabras—neither of which was performed in its entirety during his lifetime—judged by his contemporaries to be insufficient to overcome the deficiencies of the respective libretti. Nevertheless, Schubert wrote effectively for ensembles of voices in both sacred and secular works, his dexterity at intertwining vocal and instrumental lines reaching a zenith in the duet ‘Licht und Liebe’ (D.352). Hoffman is joined in his performance of ‘Licht und Liebe’ by tenor Andrew Owens, whose refulgent, sagaciously-inflected singing is marginally disserved by editing that favors his colleague, yet the imbalance between the voices intensifies focus on the intricacy of the interweaving lines and lends the articulations of ‘ein süßes Licht,’ rendered with unaffected beauty, hypnotic plaintiveness.
Composed in 1826 to verses by Johann Gabriel Seidl, ‘Der Wanderer an den Mond’ (D.870) exemplifies the endearing guilelessness of Schubert’s art, the song’s structure assuming the strophic lucidity of a Volkslied. Hoffman pronounces each word of the text with interpretive alertness, but he is also attentive to the song’s prevailing straightforwardness, following rather than imposing the gently-ebbing phrasing. ‘Du bist die Ruh’ (D.776) is rightly among the most popular of Schubert’s settings of lines by Friedrich Rückert, but it is sung here with fascinating individuality, the baritone’s performance gratifyingly untouched by the ponderousness too often derived from the Lied’s recorded legacy. The union of tonal luster, verbal acuity, and expressive sensitivity that characterizes Hoffman’s singing of these Schubert Lieder provides a performance of ‘In Frühling’ (D.882) that blossoms with vernal renewal.
It is nonsensical when so little singing of distinction is now heard in any repertoire that so much effort is wasted on debating by which voices music like Beatles songs should be sung. Naturally, there are listeners for whom the original Beatles recordings of the songs are sacrosanct, but the surest measure of a song’s quality is its effectiveness in performances by artists other than those by and for whom it was created. Is it not more advantageous, for instance, to consider how the composer, the performer, and listeners benefit from such an endeavor than to question the artistic value of Sting’s recordings of songs by John Dowland?
Alongside like-minded—and equally-talented—musical partners, Hoffman demonstrates that there is no single type of voice that is exclusively ‘right’ for Beatles songs. A lauded exponent of bel canto repertoire whose repertory also includes McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio, Owens again duets with Hoffman in ‘The Word,’ their voices proving to be as thrilling individually and in ensemble in this music as in Schubert. Perpetuating the ebullience of Hoffman’s singing, Owens repeatedly ascends to top C with giddy ease that elucidates the song’s words. The vastly different atmospheres of ‘Taxman’ and ‘If I Fell,’ the latter one of the jewels of Hard Day’s Night, are explicated with poetic wonder and metaphysical depth that never threaten to supercede the radiant joy of making music.
Released on the 1966 album Revolver, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ is cited as one of McCartney’s favorites among his songs penned for the Beatles. Hearing Hoffman’s handling of his words and melodic lines, the subtleties of which are conveyed with understated intensity and interplay between voice and piano recalling the mélodies of Duparc, might well further increase his esteem for the song. Likewise, the wistful, affectionate strains of ‘Julia,’ written by Lennon as a tribute to his mother a decade after her early passing, are sculpted with tenderness, though Hoffman and Blier maintain clear-sighted objectivity, thereby inviting the listener to draw subtexts from personal experiences. The voice is always centered in the words, from which the music emerges with conversational directness.
In comparison with much of the music that she sings in her career in opera, concert, and recital, Beatles songs virtually constitute ‘Early Music’ for soprano Julia Bullock. The intelligence and imagination of Bullock’s singing of Beatles songs spotlight unexpected parallels between this material and the works of John Adams that are prominent in her repertoire, not the least significant of which is an embrace of melancholy when the meaning of a word or the projection of a feeling requires it. Released on the genre-defying 1967 LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, ‘She’s Leaving Home’ becomes in the performance by Bullock and Hoffman a wrenchingly poignant paean to self-reliance and the conflicting grief, guilt, and elation of leaving and being left behind. Acclaimed since its first airplay in 1965 as a pinnacle of the poetic eloquence of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, ‘Norwegian Wood’ has been sung in the subsequent decades by an array of voices, few of which imparted its charms as mesmerizingly as Bullock’s.
Had his storied career produced no other songs, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ would have secured George Harrison’s prominence among the Twentieth Century’s best songwriters. Like a small number of Schubert’s Lieder, the song has achieved widespread recognition beyond its inaugural context, its entrancing hook and ambivalent harmonic progressions—immediately identifiable as Harrison’s yet as universal as birdsong and the roar of the sea—enthralling artists and listeners. Unsurprisingly, Bullock and Hoffman approach the song with their own perspectives, but Harrison’s writing is honored with loving fidelity. The pain that throbs in the words is healed by the balm of these voices, the bronzed richness of Bullock’s lower register glowing like magma as it cascades through phrases.
‘Yesterday’ is arguably the most iconic of the Beatles songs chosen for this recording; and perhaps also the most-frequently-covered of all Beatles songs. As with recordings of Schubert Lieder, a new cover of ‘Yesterday’ must earn its place among its brethren, justifying its existence not solely by novelty—after all, what can a singer do with this music that has not already been done?—but, more importantly, by quality. Regret, longing, and uncertainty simmer in Hoffman’s singing, but the generality with which some singers interpret the song is supplanted here by near-confessional specificity. It is not necessary to know of which aspects of his life Hoffman sings: the candor of his ‘Yesterday’ resonates as movingly as the sound of the voice. Schubert’s and the Beatles’ yesterdays now seem so far away, but, when sung with the unflagging engagement and excitement heard on this disc, their songs are undeniably and deservedly here to stay.
