Romantic Arias by Gerhaher and Harding

Christian Gerhaher’s song recital recordings have drawn superlatives from every corner of the critical world — mine included, and without apology. So when a first disc of operatic arias arrives from this singular artist, the expectations are almost dangerously high. He meets them. More than meets them.

What Daniel Harding and Gerhaher have assembled here is not your standard baritone showcase. Forget the familiar war-horses. The repertoire on Romantic Arias has been chosen, as the booklet note puts it with admirable directness, for musical quality rather than popularity — and that principle alone tells you something important about the intelligence at work. Most listeners will recognize the Tannhäuser excerpts and little else. That’s precisely the point.

Schubert and opera: a famously uneasy marriage. The composer kept trying, kept failing to crack the theatrical problem, and posterity has largely looked the other way. But the excerpts from Graf von Gleichen and Alfonso und Estrella here demand a second hearing — and a third. The Count’s aria from Graf von Gleichen burns. Gerhaher finds in it two emotions that rarely inhabit the same phrase comfortably — longing and dread — and he lets them coexist without resolving the tension. That’s harder than it sounds. And the opening of “Sie mir gegrüßt, o Sonne” from Alfonso und Estrella, that invocation to the sun, has a bewitching atmospheric stillness that Gerhaher sustains with the breath control of a man who has spent decades thinking about how Schubert’s melodic lines actually work. Even “Der Jäger ruhte hingegossen,” which on paper reads as narrative recitative — potentially inert stuff — becomes vivid in his hands, the words themselves doing the dramatic work.

The voice. Let’s start there, actually — or return to it. Gerhaher possesses one of the purest lyric baritones of his generation, possibly of any generation currently active. There’s a smoothness to the instrument that never tips into blandness, a warmth that seduces without sentimentalizing. Wolfram’s Act II invocation from Tannhäuser — music that can feel, in lesser performances, like Wagner treading water — emerges here as something genuinely radiant, the sometimes tortured word-imagery almost forgotten in the face of that sound. The “Lied an den Abendstern” is simply poetic. No qualification needed.

But beauty of tone is the beginning, not the end. What lifts Gerhaher’s operatic singing into rare territory is exactly what has always distinguished his Schubert and Schumann: he approaches every phrase as a lieder singer would, which means the text is never decoration. It drives. The recitative opening the Genoveva excerpt — Siegfried saddling his horse, preparing to ride home — never sags or stumbles. Gerhaher uses the syllables as propulsion, and suddenly you’re not watching a singer at a microphone. You’re watching a man in a hurry, electric with anticipation, impatient to be gone.

That quality — the sense that every single phrase has been thought about, not just learned — is rarer in opera than it should be. Gerhaher brings it here as naturally as breathing.

This disc is, without qualification, essential.