There is a particular kind of recital program that announces its own intelligence before a single note is played. This is one of them.
Susan Graham and Malcolm Martineau have built their collaboration over years into something that feels less like accompanist-and-singer than a genuine artistic partnership — the kind where the piano isn’t supporting the voice so much as thinking alongside it. On this disc, titled Vixens and Viragos, they’ve organized a program around the literary figure of Mignon, Goethe’s mysterious, androgynous child from Wilhelm Meister, and then ranged outward from that center into French repertoire that suits Graham the way a well-cut coat suits its owner.
The Mignon group is the heart of things, and it’s shrewdly assembled.
Six settings by different composers, including Schubert, Liszt, Wolf, Duparc, and — this I confess surprised me — Tchaikovsky. The Russian composer set “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” rather than “Kennst du das Land,” which means his contribution stands slightly apart from the other three who wrestled with the same Goethe text. Graham sings the Tchaikovsky in Russian, which is right, whatever the booklet’s German title suggests; it’s an affecting piece, genuinely melodically generous, and she brings to it a warmth that makes you wonder why it isn’t better known. But its placement — sandwiched between the Kennst-du-das-Land settings — does create a small puzzle of program logic. Three composers set identical words; one does not. Grouping the three together would have made a cleaner argument.
No matter. Wolf’s “Kennst du das Land” is one of the supreme achievements of the lied repertoire, full stop — a song in which the yearning doesn’t resolve so much as accumulate, phrase by phrase, until the third strophe breaks open like weather. Graham and Martineau find the surge in it without sacrificing the shadows underneath. This is not a reading that irons out the ambiguity; the piano voicing stays transparent even as the dynamic level climbs, and Graham’s tone darkens rather than simply expands. Liszt’s setting is handsome, more overtly theatrical in its rhetoric, and she gives it full value — though Liszt, for all his genius for transformation, didn’t quite reach the psychological depth Wolf found in the same poem. That’s not Graham’s fault; it’s just the difference between a very good song and an incomparable one.
Duparc’s response to the text is in French — one verse fewer than Liszt or Wolf — and Graham’s feeling for the mélodie’s particular emotional grammar is remarkable. There’s a quality in her voice that suits Duparc specifically: the legato she produces isn’t just smooth, it’s weighted, as if each phrase carries its own specific gravity. The song moves from stillness into something close to passion, and she doesn’t rush that transformation.
Schubert’s Mignon setting is a different matter entirely — quieter, more inward, touched with the particular Schubertian melancholy that turns grief into something almost consoling. Graham is deeply felt here, undemonstrative in the best sense.
The French repertoire elsewhere on the program is where this disc becomes something to return to repeatedly. Her Berlioz is wonderful — opulent in tone, sure in its sense of line, the kind of singing that reminds you how closely allied Berlioz’s vocal writing is to his orchestral imagination. But it’s the Poulenc cycle that lingers longest. Poulenc’s songs occupy a strange emotional territory: irony and tenderness and something close to desolation sometimes in the same measure. Graham understands this without trying to explain it, which is the right approach. “Mon cadavre est doux comme un gant” — that title alone, “My corpse is soft as a glove” — gets from her an intensity that doesn’t tip into melodrama. “Violon” is tremendously alive. And the closing “Fleurs” is exquisite: the legato here is what you notice first, that creamy, even thread of tone, but what stays with you is the quality of attention she and Martineau bring to Poulenc’s final instruction to his singers — an instruction the booklet wisely includes.
Martineau throughout is exactly what this music requires: responsive, unobtrusive in the best sense, technically immaculate, capable of coloring a phrase from the inside out.
Vixens and Viragos is not a recital that shouts. It argues, carefully, with real intelligence behind its choices, and Graham’s voice — still one of the most radiant mezzos before the public — is the instrument through which that argument is made. Essential.
