Schade’s Schubert is
straight ahead, glorious

Partnership with Malcolm Martineau
yields fine performance

by David Gordon Duke

DIE SCHONE MULLERIN
Performed by Michael Schade, tenor,
and Malcolm Martineau, piano
Chan Centre, Nov. 21.

The Vancouver Recital Society has regularly featured the big Schubert keyboard sonatas. This season the spotlight is on Schubert lieder, with performances of his two late song cycles on texts by Wilhelm Müller: last month Winterreise and, on Sunday, Die Schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller-Maid), sung by Michael Schade.

Born in Switzerland and raised in Germany and Canada, tenor Michael Schade currently calls Toronto home when he’s not on the road performing recitals and opera throughout North America and Europe. His instrument is wonderful: he delivers a shining, focused sound, polished and carefully graded. His wide dynamic range extends from intimate pianissimos through stentorian fortes, brought forth with complete control and meticulous intonation.

Co-recitalist Malcolm Martineau is the sort of uncanny accompanist who seems to know what his singer will do before a sound is uttered. His palette of colours is refined and his degree of support remarkable.

Like Winterreise, Die Schöne Mülllerin was performed complete and without a break, in a house fully lit to facilitate following the text and translations. Schöne Mülllerin is the more overtly lyrical of the two cycles, so many of its songs are routinely excerpted for recital programmes. In context even such familiar numbers as Das Wandern (Wandering) and Des Baches Wiegenlied (The Brook's Lullaby) take on greater import. In this performance, songs were often nearly fused together, the postlude of one triggering the subsequent prelude for heightened dramatic continuity.

The Schade/Martineau interpretation is geared to please traditionalists. Theirs is a partnership of sorts, but an unequal one: the singer is always front and centre. Schade's deportment was theatrical, his gestures the stock body language of countless commonplace performances.

Last month Ian Bostridge and Leif Ove Andnses presented a multi-layered Winterreise, provocative, complex, and intrinsically focused on the psychology of Schubert’s despondent hero. Schade was content simply to sing gloriously and dramatically in a black-and-white reading of the score without ironies or ambiguities. This was a performance about narrative and emotion— a skilled affirmation of the established values of fine singing.

Vancouver Sun
23 Nov. 2004

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