Tuesday’s free lunchtime concert in the RBA came courtesy of the German Consulate who had flown in baritone Samuel Chan and pianist Constanze Beckmann from Kiel to perform a recital of songs by Walter Braunfels and Hanns Eisler; both composers driven from public life in Germany by the Nazis.

I’m pretty familiar with Hanns Eisler’s music but I don’t think I’d heard anything by Braunfels before so it was interesting to hear ten of his early songs.  They are early too.  The songs came from his two cycles Opus 1 and Opus 4 so written in his early twenties.  They are tonal and very much in the 19th century Lieder tradition.  They were sensitively performed and quite pleasant but not my favourite german songs ever.

The Eisler set was more interesting on a number of levels.  Eighteen short songs; mostly to texts by Brecht, were sung/played with barely a breath between them which was actually quite effective.  Brecht’s sardonic texts work so well with Eisler’s spiky, jazz inflected music and Sam was prepared to take some risks here and not sound too operatic or beautiful.  We talked about it afterwards and he was very aware that Eisler didn’t like opera singers singing his songs.  (Which patly at least explains why I’ve heard them more often in a cabaret style).  I like Sam’s versions though.  He has a fine voice (bigger and more authoritative than when he was in the Ensemble Studio) but he used the “fine” quality sparingly here and did full justice to the sometimes quite crudely expressed anger and despair of the songs.  Constanze’s accompaniment was similarly idiomatic.  All in all very satisfying and including some songs I hadn’t heard before.

Photo credits: Karen E. Reeves