SUZANNE MURPHY's RDS recital on Wednesday ranged from Gluck to operetta, through Brahms, the Schumanns (Clara and Robert), Chausson and Strauss. The pallor of death informed the opening Divinite's du Styx by Gluck and the transformation to the concerns of lover's smiles and glances of the three songs by Brahms was effortlessly negotiated.
It was interesting to hear the three songs by Clara Schumann, whose abilities in the creation of a characterful motif are not, here matched by any real insight into the control of targer shapes or forms. And it was good to hear these pieces, at once arty and satonish, so carefully and so fondly done.
Placing them directly before one of her husband Robert's finest creations, Frauenliebe und Leben was, of course, bound to point up the weaknesses of Clara's work, as it would the work of any minor 19th century composer. Suzanne Murphy's way with this cycle is intimate and deeply touching, embracing moments of extraordinary interpretative latitude which somehow never come to undermine the integrity of either music or text. Her partner at the piano, Ingrid Surgenor, sounding more mellow of tone than usual, was at the peak of her form, probing, ruminative, and always alert.
Ms Murphy's Duparc doesn't have quite the same spine tingle factor, but in the songs of Richard Strauss she is fully in her element, so much so that the generally restrained RDS audience interrupted the group with a burst of applause after the climactic close of Zueignung. The evening ended with operetta (Millocker, Zeller, Lehar) or rather with a generous sequence of encores interspersed with the sort of easy going banter which reminded one of just how much this singer is loved by the Dublin public.
