A Winter's Tale

A solitary traveler wanders aimlessly, love-sick and world-weary, every object and place reminding him of his lost love and impending death. Such is the stuff of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, surely the most beloved of song-cycles and one of the greatest challenges a singer can take on. The marriage of Wilhelm Müller’s 24 poems and Schubert’s evocative music is one of the defining moments of German Romanticism. It takes a singer with just the right amount of assuredness and vulnerability to pull it off successfully.

On Sunday, that singer was bass-baritone José van Dam, who performed the cycle at Jordan Hall as part of the FleetBoston Celebrity Series. He brought a considerable amount of necessary pathos to the work, yet was dignified in his delivery. The 62-year-old Belgian singer is known throughout the world for his performances in various operatic productions, from Mozart to Messiaen (he created the title role in the latter’s St. François d’Assise), as well as his appearances with many of the world’s finest orchestras. He also proved to be quite a capable actor in his portrayal of an aging, fading vocalist who takes on two promising pupils in the 1988 film Le Maître de Musique.

One of the pitfalls of a work like Winterreise is that too often it is performed as a single, unrelenting lament. The singer is so tortured that by the end, his meeting with a stone-faced organ grinder does not have nearly the chilling impact that it should. And while this work is all about excessive emotions, an excessive display can hurt its credibility. Van Dam never overplayed the Werther-like persona of the narrator. He avoided the indulgent self-pity that lends itself easily to the work. The cycle as a whole, while overwhelmingly dark, has moments of repose, fragmentary glimpses of life that end as soon as they begin.

In songs like “The Post,” Van Dam highlighted the contrast between the cheerful opening and the abrupt change of mood in the second stanza. Each utterance of “Mein Herz” (“My Heart”) encompassed the emotional spectrum, from optimism to anguish. At his finest moments, he was able to take a semi-strophic song, like the opening “Gute Nacht” (“Good Night”), and turn it into a compelling narrative, making the music speak differently each time it reappeared. There was a richness to his vocal part that one doesn’t often hear in this music. His projection was never forced; instead, we were treated to a voice that was in absolute control of the music and served it in the full range of dynamics.

There was, however, some slight jumbling of words and one can forgive such blunders in light of the fact that van Dam performed the 75-minute work without break and from memory. It is surprising, though, that a singer who is used to performing lead roles in four-hour operas would have such problems, especially for a standard work like Winterreise, which he obviously knows inside-out and has even recorded in the past. The tempi tended to be on the slower side, but none of the songs dragged. Pianist Maciej Pukulski was effective in keeping the organic structure of the cycle from ever losing its momentum. He complimented van Dam with his clear, yet dark tone, which especially came through in the famous “Der Lindenbaum” (“The Linden Tree”), “Die Krähe” (“The Crow”) and “Das Wirtshaus” (“The Inn”). The two take Winterreise, as well as an all-Schumann program, to New York this week.