Soprano Nina Stemme Performs at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 07 May 2025 17:38

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Stephanie Berger

At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Friday, May 2nd, I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a terrific recital—presented by Carnegie Hall—featuring the magnificent, Swedish soprano Nina Stemme—her astonishing performance in the title role of Richard Strauss’s glorious Ariadne auf Naxos at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010 is possibly the greatest theatrical experience that I have ever had—expertly accompanied by pianist Roland Pöntinen.

The event started strongly with a marvelous rendition of Edward Elgar’s wonderful Sea Pictures, Op. 37, which consists of five parts beginning with “Sea Slumber Song,” which is set to a beautiful poem by Roden Noel. The striking lyric for the next song, “In Haven,” was written by the composer’s wife, Caroline Alice Elgar. The third song, “Sabbath Morning at Sea,” has the one text in the set written by a canonical poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The following song, “Where Corals Lie,” is also based on an excellent poem by a distinguished author, Richard Garnett. The final song, “The Swimmer,” is of less literary interest but is nonetheless an equally compelling achievement in the genre.

Stemme then brilliantly performed four extraordinary songs by Kurt Weill, the first two set to texts by Bertolt Brecht, beginning with “Surabaya Johnny”—which was famously interpreted by Marlene Dietrich—from the musical Happy End—which was adapted from the same Damon Runyon story as Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls—and succeeded by “Nannas Lied.” The second two were French songs, starting with “Je ne t’aime pas,” which preceded “Youkali”—which, according to the program note by Janet E. Bedell, had its source as “an instrumental interlude for Jacques Deval’s French play Marie Galante” and was rediscovered by Teresa Stratas for her 1981 album, The Unknown Kurt Weill.

The second half of the evening, devoted to music by Richard Wagner, was as memorable if not more so, opening with the exquisite Wesendonck Lieder: “Stehe still!”, “Der Engel,” “Im Treibhaus,” “Schmerzen,” and most indelibly of all, the magisterial “Träume,” which for me inevitably recalls Luchino Visconti’s immortal film, Ludwig. The concert concluded with the stunning Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, in the arrangement by Franz Liszt. Enthusiastic applause for this incomparable artist elicited two fabulous encores: first, the superb "Var det en dröm?," Op. 37, No. 4, by Jean Sibelius, a setting of a text in Swedish by the 19th-century Finnish poet and dramatist, Josef Julius Wecksell; and, finally, Weill’s enchanting “My Ship”—with lyrics by Ira Gershwin—from the celebrated musical Lady in the Dark, written by Moss Hart.