Classical

Wolf Lieder, Ian Bostridge with Antonio Pappano -- 4 Stars

Not since bass-baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has someone been able to make a career in the classical song repertoire, where finesse and imagination are as important as tone, and almost everything is in German. Baritone Thomas Hampson has come close, but he spends at least half his time in opera. No, the successor is Ian Bostridge, an English tenor who gave up teaching history for the concert stage.

Bostridge sings German lieder with intelligence and an intensity that sometimes borders on the neurotic. That suits Hugo Wolf perfectly.

Wolf's songs often get overlooked in favor of Schubert's, Schumann's, Brahms', Mahler's and Strauss'. That is partly because they all wrote great orchestral or chamber music; Wolf wrote mainly songs. He drew on the older romantic composers, harmonically and in subject matter, using familiar poems by Goethe and Eichendorff about world-weariness, love-death, night-longing. Later, he found Spanish and Italian poems in translation, and his songs took on a wider emotional range. Their richness (largely conveyed by the elaborate piano writing) coexists with a simple melodic line that suggests the cabaret or music hall.

Like the painter Gustav Klimt, Wolf was a fin de siecle Viennese eclectic, unsettling in his ambivalent embrace of a great tradition that was actually over. After him came the deluge: Schoenberg and Berg. But he missed it. Syphilis, contracted early, killed him in 1903, at age 43.

On a new release from EMI, Bostridge gives each song a strong attitude. In "Verschiegene Lied," he is hushed and awestruck. Physical longing pervades "Peregrina 1," snarling contempt in his dispatch of a newspaper critic in "Abschied." Bostridge's voice is not as colorful as Fischer-Dieskau's and others', and he evokes feeling mainly by underlining words or adding volume, which can lead him to push. There's less of that on this disc. His voice is more evenly produced, and his top notes are big and ringing. Antonio Pappano, the chief conductor at Covent Garden, is a wonderful accompanist, brilliant and songful, without overshadowing the singer.

It has been a long time since the last great Wolf recording. The Wolf Society albums of the 1930s were reissued by EMI in a 5-CD set in 1998, and it is still in print. Now you know where to go for more.