Matthias Goerne & Víkingur Ólafsson

Once heard, it is never forgotten. Matthias Goerne’s dark, mellow baritone places a hypnotic veil over the Austro-German songs he loves. No male singer can float a long line like Goerne can. And that is never truer than in Schubert, a composer whose world-weary seriousness seems absolutely at one with Goerne’s own penetrating gaze and velvety voice. This traversal of great Austro-German song begins with Schubert’s great expression of alienation, Der Wanderer, and ends with the heartbroken Four Serious Songs by Brahms that find ultimate love among reservoirs of despair. In between, we hear songs of elegy and yearning, of suffering and endurance, but also of romance and hope. Present every step of the way is pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, a musician whose delicacy of expression and concentration of feeling are at one with Goerne’s. It was written by one critic that when singing the composer, Mattias Goerne ‘seems to hug Schubert’s incantatory lines to himself.’