One could call this recital of songs by Susan Zarrabi and Gerold Huber “women’s love and life” – although there is nothing by Schumann. But felt by (almost) everyone else: Carl Loewe, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Hugo Wolf, Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Kurt Weill. And Franz Schubert, of course, because it’s Schubert Week again in the Boulez Saal.
Schubert’s incomparable art
Singer-curator Thomas Hampson, who opened this week himself on Monday with a song recital, is now setting the stage very far, right into the 20th century. It is also about the question of what traces Schubert’s incomparable art of immediately grasping the spoken or unspoken essence of a poem and finding an equivalent in tones has left on other composers.
With her program, Susan Zarrabi wants to revolve around different facets of femininity, the protagonists of the songs are called Therese, Daphne or Nanna. At least one composer, Emilie Mayer, is also represented. With her broadly sparkling, but never sluggishly flowing mezzo-soprano, the Munich native immediately wins people over, and she sings so clearly and incredibly understandably that one can almost completely do without reading along.
Zarrabi has been to the Schubert Week several times as part of Young Singers concerts, this is her first solo evening. Pianist Gerold Huber accompanies with decades of experience and composure, has completely internalized when he holds back, offers the discreet musical basis – and when he plays vigorously, for example in the introduction to “The Young Nun”, whose stormy excitement of belief Schubert with tremolos on the piano captures.
The highlight, programmatically and musically, is the only really well-known hit of the evening, Schubert’s “Ave Maria”, which actually has the complicated title “Ellen’s Song III, Hymn to the Virgin” and whose core motif is the major third from b to d, to the dotted “i” is from “Mary”. Zarrabi raises her voice effortlessly, glides smoothly through the layers, but these moments become the climax with what she sings immediately afterwards: “Gentlemen, I came onto the love market at the age of seventeen” – “Nanna’s Song” by Kurt Weil , whose elongated “e” in “Schnee vom Jahres” acts as a counterpart to Schubert’s “i”. With two songs, Zarrabi reflects the typical cliché that men have always had of women as saints and whores. Does she reproduce it with it? One can think about that.
Weill is heard several times in this concert, Zarrabi feels audibly at ease in his music, as well as in that of Friedrich Hollaender, who composed a homage to a kleptomaniac (“Because I stole without choice, it doesn’t matter”). In these final songs of the evening, she not only lends her voice to the text, but also really slips into the roles and goes all out in acting. No wonder, since the beginning of this season she has also been a member of the ensemble around the corner at the Komische Oper Berlin, where she appears on March 17th as Dorabella in Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” or in May as Arsamene in Handel’s “Xerxes”. . You can look forward to it.
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