Appl/Baillieu: Lines of Life review – gifted baritone blends Kurtág and Schubert

Over 25 years, the Oxford International Song festival has adopted a creative approach to programming. Benjamin Appl’s pairing of Schubert lieder with spiny miniatures by György Kurtág was a perfect example. Your Schubert crowd isn’t necessarily your Kurtág crew, and yet the 280-year-old Holywell Music Room was packed to the rafters.

Ellen Mawhinney and Daniel Silcock, one of the festival’s Young Artist duos, kicked things off with an aquatic-themed recital that showed off Mawhinney’s powerful soprano and Silcock’s poetic instincts at the piano. From the inspiriting Scottish ballad Kishmul’s Galley to Hamilton Harty’s impassioned Sea Wrack, their smartly curated 15 minutes paved the way for Appl and James Baillieu’s equally satisfying programme, Lines of Life.

The German British baritone is a gifted communicator, binding together songs that could easily have rubbed each other the wrong way. It helps that he has worked intensively with Kurtág. As he explained from the stage, sometimes he’d spend an entire morning on the first line of a song before returning after lunch ready to work on line two, only to have the exacting composer say, “Well, shall we start from the beginning?” His unforced delivery of these concentrated musical nuggets, many of them unaccompanied, was intently focused.

The Six Hölderlin-Gesänge set gnomic poetry that is hard enough to grasp before the composer ups the ante with notes and rhythm. Appl took on board their frenetic gasps and growls, and yet at other times, Kurtág’s melismatic writing came across as profoundly beautiful.

The Schubert selection was bound together by common themes of love, longing and loss. The nihilistic Totengräbers Heimweh brought out a brittle, sardonic quality that found echoes in the melancholy Schäfers Klagelied and the otherwise jaunty Die Taubenpost.

There was vocal beauty too, in Viola for example, one of Schubert’s loveliest songs about a jilted violet that in the wrong hands could have turned saccharine. Baillieu’s dramatically astute accompaniment drove the narrative here as it did throughout. Just occasionally, when pulling back to soften the tone, Appl’s voice didn’t quite go where he wanted it to, but such moments were few and far between in a rewarding musical journey that segued seamlessly from start to finish.