Many of those who clapped extensively must have intensively understood the sentence from Schubert’s song “An die Musik” after this afternoon’s concert: “You have transported me into a better world!”, it says there. Because yes, the Schubertiade, to which the pianist Alice Sara Ott and friends have invited to the Hercules Hall, is a small miracle, a seventy-minute vacation, in its lightness, its dizzying musicality and its intelligent concert dramaturgy. Also a gift to everyone who enjoys concert breaks about as much as a sore throat in spring.
In their homage to the house music of the Biedermeier period, in which genres were wildly mixed, Ott and her hand-picked colleagues present Schubert’s “Trout Quintet” in its entirety, but intersperse songs between the individual movements. In the first bars of the first movement, you can momentarily notice that the ensemble doesn’t play with this line-up every day. But the string quartet and pianist quickly find themselves in a glittering, flowing stream that keeps the movement in lively movement with the looseness of playing among friends.
Ott’s weightless playing provides impulses through well-placed accents, the reactions come promptly, so that this chamber music piece can be considered a lesson in musical communication. There are moments of rare beauty when, at the beginning of the performance, the musicians behave virtually motionless, only to jump into the forte all the more energetically when they move together. Or when Nils Mönkemeyer’s warm viola tone and Thomas Reif’s violin sparkle complement each other beautifully in a melancholic dialogue in the second movement. Wies de Boevé (double bass) and Sebastian Klinger (cello) provide a reliable foundation without giving the piece any symphonic gravity. The song interludes fit organically into these dialogues.
Selected art of phrasing: the baritone Benjamin Appl.
(Photo: Uwe Arens and Sony Classical)
Benjamin Appl’s interpretation of Schubert’s “Wohin?”, the second song from “The Beautiful Müllerin”, sung in F major, not only leads harmonically to the quintet’s Andante. Appl’s flexible baritone, used here with exquisite phrasing, fits sonically into the quintet context, be it with Schubert, the captivatingly beautiful “Searching for Lambs” by Ralph Vaughan Williams or a wild “Since greybeards inform us” performed with extroverted jubilation “. The fast-paced Beethovenian arrangement of an Irish song prepares you for the finale of the Schubert Quintet: from the tastefully restrained opening bars to the wild sweep and cheers for the successful attempt at a Munich Schubertiade.