A Baritone Ends His Residency With a Poetic Homage

Last Sunday, Goerne took his artist-in-residence series to the 92nd Street Y, where he explored new dimensions in familiar Schubert songs by performing them in unusual arrangements for voice and strings, joined by members of the orchestra. Schubert’s gravely beautiful “Death and the Maiden” sounded Mahlerian and starkly ominous, with Goerne, his voice dark and expressive, backed by a string quartet and bass instead of a piano.

The first half of this program involved nearly an hour of concentrated singing for the tireless Goerne, including an intense rendition of Hanns Eisler’s rightly named “Ernste Gesänge” (“Serious Songs”), an autumnal 1962 cycle. And in several songs by Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, Goerne’s exemplary young accompanist was, no less, Daniil Trifonov, who played beautifully.

For the last program of his residency, Thursday at David Geffen Hall, Goerne sang a work that involved a different kind of risk: John Adams’ “The Wound-Dresser,” with Jaap van Zweden leading the Philharmonic. This poignant 1988 piece for baritone and orchestra sets passages from a poem by Walt Whitman about his experience nursing wounded soldiers during the Civil War in makeshift hospitals on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

The piece was written for Sanford Sylvan, the beloved American baritone who died in January. Sylvan “made our American language a thing of beauty every time he sang it,” Adams wrote in tribute to Sylvan at the time. A singer performing “The Wound-Dresser” must be able to convey the cadences and rhythms of the American language, no less so in Whitman’s elegantly poetic words.

Goerne sang the texts with clarity, empathy and nuance, though, understandably, with traces of a German accent. Some of his delivery lacked crisp articulation. No matter. His performance was magnificent, in part because a great German artist was embracing a distinctively American piece and, in doing so, conveyed its universal resonances.

When Goerne sang of the daily drudgery at the hospital, “Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,” his voice was somber and earthy. But in moments when the poet is overcome with idealized love for the maimed soldiers (“One turns to me his appealing eyes — poor boy! I never knew you.”), Goerne sang with plaintive tenderness, lifting phrases into the light upper reaches of his voice. In the opening section, beautifully rendered by van Zweden and the orchestra, Goerne’s singing of Whitman’s spare-no-details descriptions of bloody soldiers soared over a backdrop of strings playing steady, swaying chords, music at once numbing and celestial.

It was a great idea to precede this work with another distinctively American piece: Ives’ “Central Park in the Dark,” in which soft cluster chords in the strings suggest the hazy summer nighttime in the park as sounds of whistled tunes, ragtime pianos from apartment windows and more intrude.

After intermission van Zweden led an emphatic, well-played account of Brahms’ First Symphony. Yet the Brahms work echoed back to the concert at the 92nd Street Y, which concluded with violinist Frank Huang and cellist Carter Brey (both principals with the Philharmonic) and Trifonov in a majestic yet impetuous account of Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 1. You could say that Goerne was somewhat responsible for this exhilarating trio performance, since it was a significant part of his thoughtful residency.

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Event Information:

The program at the New York Philharmonic runs through Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, 212 875-5656, nyphil.org

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.