Wolf Centenary, Wigmore Hall, London

A slow and sacred evening

A hundred years, to the very day, since he died, Hugo Wolf might well have been satisfied that all 44 songs in his Spanisches Liederbuch were performed last Saturday evening. Actually, he would probably have thought it no more than his due. Yet not all the songs are on the same high level, and dropping a few would have sharpened our appreciation of the better ones. Nor, surely, need Wolf's published order have been followed, for the 10 sacred songs that open the collection made for a rather monotonous sequence.

The evening seemed still longer since the printers failed to deliver half the programme books, so the hard-pressed staff at the Wigmore Hall had to make last-minute photocopies, delaying the start by half an hour. Would aficionados be up in arms if we had surtitles for song recitals? After all, you can't look at the singers when you're trying to follow the words and their translation, and Matthias Goerne and Christine Schäfer were not the most watchable of singers anyway. He tended to look at the floor or the piano lid more than the audience, and she hardly expressed anything with her face at all.

As for the voices, Goerne's is growing bigger and heavier – just as it should. And it is good to hear a soprano such as Schäfer who sounds young, so that her fluttering agitation in "Bitt' ihn, o Mutter", and breathiness in "Geh, Geliebter", were dramatically real. But in many songs she went only part of the way in terms of feeling. Her voice is clean, accurate, but rather cool, so her scoops in "Klinge, klinge, mein Pandero" seemed a half-hearted attempt at Spanish colouring, and she was unable to let herself go in "Sagt, seid ihr es, feiner Herr". Even "In dem Schatten meiner Locken" – a gift to any soubrette – found her running out of imagination, as if the character had left her behind.

Like the pianist, Eric Schneider, Schäfer was best in the lighter songs – he did the piano postlude to "Sie blasen zum Abmarsch" very crisply, and was nimble in finger-twisters. Even with the piano lid fully open, he never drowned the singers. Yet with Goerne, he could have taken the risk, and did, once, in "Da nur Leid und Leidenschaft", and together they made a virile impression.

Goerne was doubtless responsible for choosing tempi that were too fast for some of the slower songs, though if he did set the pace in "Wenn du zu den Blumen gehst", it had him almost snatching at phrases. Ideally, of course, singer and pianist should fuse. Perhaps we need fewer lieder specialists at the keyboard and more real pianists.