Mahler Lieder – Christian Gerhaher

There’s a moment about two minutes into “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” where Christian Gerhaher simply stops pushing the tone and lets it hover — and the whole room, or at least this listener’s living room, seems to hold its breath with him. That’s the test piece for any Mahler recitalist, and he passes it the way Fischer-Dieskau used to pass it, by understanding that the song’s drama is the absence of drama, the slow dissolution of the ego into silence.

Gerhaher has spent the last two decades quietly assembling a claim to be the most intelligent Lieder singer before the public, and intelligence is really the word — not showmanship, not the exquisite plush sound some baritones trade on, though his voice is plenty beautiful when he wants it to be. What distinguishes him is the sense that every vowel has been weighed, every consonant placed with the patience of a man setting type by hand. Gerold Huber, his longtime partner at the keyboard (they have been working together since their student days in Munich), plays as though he is breathing through the same set of lungs. This is not an accompanist who follows; it’s chamber music, properly conceived, with the piano’s inner voices given as much care as the vocal line sitting on top of them.

The twenty songs gathered here draw from the Wunderhorn settings, the Rückert-Lieder, and scattered early items, and the sequencing tells its own story — cheerful rusticity giving way, by degrees, to something darker and more inward. “Rheinlegendchen” opens things with a kind of folkish wink, Gerhaher letting a little smile into the tone without ever condescending to the material (a trap plenty of singers fall into with Mahler’s faux-naive Wunderhorn manner). “Ging heut morgen übers Feld” bounces along with real physical pleasure — you can practically hear dew on grass — and then, a few tracks later, the mood curdles entirely in “Die zwei blauen Augen,” where Gerhaher’s legato thins to something almost whispered, grief without melodrama, which is the hardest kind to sing.

“Um Mitternacht” is where he really shows his hand. The climactic line — Hab’ ich die Macht in deine Hand gegeben — gets delivered with a weight that borders on vehemence, Huber’s piano thickening beneath him like gathering weather. Some baritones save nothing for this moment and arrive underpowered; Gerhaher paces the whole song as an arch, and the payoff lands. “Liebst du um Schönheit,” by contrast, is pure melodic generosity, sung with a tenderness that never curdles into sentimentality — no small trick, since the tune is so lovely it tempts singers to wallow.

Diction throughout is immaculate — German consonants placed with surgical precision, never spat, never softened into mush the way some non-native speakers (and, frankly, some native ones) tend to do under pressure. I recall hearing Gerhaher in Munich in a Britten War Requiem under Jansons back in 2013; English was not his native tongue, and yet his projection of text put his colleagues, native speakers both, rather in the shade. That same verbal discipline serves him, unsurprisingly, even better at home in Mahler.

Is this now the Mahler Lieder release to own? Close to it, though I wouldn’t throw out my Christianne Stotijn/Julius Drake disc on Onyx, recorded at Stoke d’Abernon in 2006 — Stotijn brings a plummy, autumnal mezzo color that suits this repertoire in ways no baritone quite can, and Drake’s pianism has its own glinting wit. Fischer-Dieskau’s 1959 Wunderhorn selections with Karl Engel remain historically indispensable, if the voice there is younger and the manner occasionally more generalized than what Gerhaher achieves now. And the two Kirchschlager/Deutsch collections have their own considerable charms.

But for sheer textual penetration — for the sense that a singer has thought as hard about these poems as about the notes sitting above them — Gerhaher and Huber stand with the best of them. The “Urlicht” that closes the program is sung with an almost unbearable simplicity, stripped of operatic grandeur, which is exactly right: this is a prayer, not an aria. Full marks, and then some.