Strauss, Berg, Schoenberg Lieder – Broderick

Some sopranos treat the recital disc as a résumé. Katherine Broderick treats it as an argument — and a good one, about how three Viennese-adjacent composers heard the human voice at the moment the nineteenth century was quietly dying.

The Strauss group is where she stakes her claim most persuasively. “Zueignung” opens with that surge of ardor Strauss never quite abandoned even at his crustiest, late-Metamorphosen stage, and Broderick doesn’t hold back the top — she leans into it, lets the voice bloom the way a big lyric soprano should when a composer hands her a climax like that. Malcolm Martineau, characteristically, resists the temptation to just accompany. In “Die Nacht” his right hand creates that hushed, almost pedal-blurred nocturnal wash while Broderick spins the vocal line above it with real breath control — no gulping for air mid-phrase, which lesser recordings of this song reveal all too readily.

“Die Georgine” gets singled out here for good reason, though I’d argue the disc’s true jewel is “Allerseelen,” composed when Strauss was barely out of adolescence and already writing like a man who understood grief from the inside. Broderick doesn’t oversell the pathos. She lets the tune do the work — sensibly, since this is one of those melodies (like Fauré’s “Après un rêve”) that collapses under too much interpretive weight. Martineau’s postlude breathes like a held-back sigh.

Turn to Berg and the emotional temperature shifts, though maybe not as far as some listeners expect. The Sieben frühe Lieder — 1905 to 1908, pre-Schoenberg-pupil Berg, still finding his harmonic legs — owe an obvious debt to the chromatic saturation of Strauss and Wolf, and I’ll admit I’ve never found them quite as melodically generous as their pedigree promises. “Nacht” is all atmosphere, a Debussy-inflected fog Berg would later burn away entirely. Broderick sings it beautifully, if I’m honest, more beautifully than the material strictly earns — her legato in “Traumgekrönt” is creamier than most complete recordings of this cycle I own, and I own several. Where the songs succeed on disc is texture, not tune, and both performers understand that; Martineau’s voicing in “Im Zimmer” has an almost Impressionist translucence, water-color rather than oil.

Then — the surprise, and it’s a real one. Schoenberg’s Brettl Lieder, cabaret songs he tossed off around 1901 for the Berlin nightclub scene, before atonality, before the twelve-tone method, before the whole apparatus of dread that has made his name a byword for difficulty. Anyone who thinks of Schoenberg purely as the architect of Pierrot lunaire will be startled by “Gigerlette,” which struts and winks with something close to Offenbach’s naughtiness, filtered through a distinctly Berlin cabaret sensibility — a hint of Satie, a splash of Viennese operetta, a wicked little tune that refuses to resolve where you expect. Broderick has evident fun here. Her diction sharpens, her tone gets a knowing edge it doesn’t need in the Strauss. “Nachtwandler” — nearly five minutes of controlled comic menace — closes the disc on a note that reminds you Schoenberg once orchestrated Johann Strauss waltzes for chamber ensemble because he genuinely loved them, not as some ironic academic exercise.

Voice-wise, Broderick is a substantial instrument for this repertoire — bigger, brighter than the soubrettish sound some collectors prefer in the Brettl Lieder — and there are moments, particularly in “Jedem das Seine,” where I wanted a touch more cabaret grit, a rawer edge to match the songs’ knowing vulgarity. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and, more recently, Dorothea Röschmann have found a wink in this material that Broderick approaches but doesn’t fully inhabit. Still, this is a minor reservation against a disc of real intelligence and generous, well-schooled singing.

Martineau, as ever, is the ideal colleague — never merely accompanying, always listening. The recorded sound is close but not claustrophobic, catching the piano’s full resonance without swallowing the voice.

A first solo recital this accomplished suggests a major career already well underway. Recommended, and warmly.