Recording of the Week, Russian Romances from Piotr Beczała and Helmut Deutsch

‘It’s not about screaming, it’s about transmitting emotions: these are two very different things.’ That’s what Piotr Beczała told me three years ago when we discussed his verismo album on Pentatone and his ongoing transition into heavier operatic roles - and his new recital of songs by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff with Helmut Deutsch provides ample evidence that he’s continuing to put his money where his mouth is. The Polish tenor has recorded relatively little song repertoire over the course of his thirty-year career, but this programme demonstrates just how affecting he can be when painting on a smaller canvas.

This music has been in Beczała's body and soul for decades: as he recounts in a brief but touching booklet-note, the songs of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff were among the repertoire which was readily available during his early life in Soviet-influenced Poland, when access to sheet-music was relatively limited. These romances were an integral part of his education at the Karol Szymanowski Academy in Katowice, where student pianists were only too happy to explore songs with such eminently satisfying (and challenging) piano-parts – and many years later he found an equally enthusiastic partner in Deutsch, with whom he had initially worked on Lieder.

Their partnership really is a match made in heaven: Beczała and Deutsch are alive to one another’s every gesture, and it’s a particular joy to hear how Beczała develops the ideas which Deutsch sets down so eloquently in the many extended introductions. (Try the first of the Tchaikovsky songs, ‘Does the day reign?’, where Deutsch’s opening phrase clearly poses the question before a word has been uttered).

Many of the songs here make formidable technical demands on the pianist as well as the singer, and I mean absolutely no disrespect to Beczała when I say that Deutsch’s playing would be worth the price of the album on its own: listen to the way he positively relishes the virtuosic postlude to that first Tchaikovsky song, or to the clarity and suppleness which he brings to Rachmaninoff’s ‘Spring Torrents’.

As usual, Deutsch is every bit as attuned to the texts as his partner: the ‘colourful carpet’ of the meadows in Rachmaninoff’s ‘How Fair This Spot’ summons a plush texture which suddenly evaporates as the focus shifts to white clouds, and Tchaikovsky’s ‘gentle stars and faint breezes’ (Track 14) are so vividly evoked that you’ll barely have need of the translations in the booklet. It will never happen, but if this doyen of collaborative pianists could be persuaded to record some solo Rachmaninoff  - or even the Tchaikovsky concertos! - I’d be all ears.

And what of Beczała? At 56, he’s in his absolute vocal prime: the voice seems to have taken on new baritonal colours which pay real dividends in songs like Rachmaninoff’s ‘Oh I beg you, forsake me not!’ and Tchaikovsky’s lugubrious ‘Night’ (the second of six songs setting texts by Daniil Maximovich Rathaus – composed, as Philip Ross Bullock’s illuminating booklet-note reminds us, directly before his death).

But recent excursions into heftier operatic territory haven’t dimmed the sunshine in the voice, and high notes – whether delivered with full-throated ardour or pianissimo delicacy – are unfailingly steady and supported. (No sign anywhere of the pressured edginess that crept into his recent recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde on Sony, though the writing here is of course rather more congenial).

The programme (running to a generous 80 minutes) is beautifully planned, too. The prevailing mood is one of nostalgia and bitter-sweet yearning, but there are several palate-cleansers along the way: Tchaikovsky’s Schubertian ‘Serenade’ is delivered with a smiling suavity that’s irresistible, and the tart little waltz ‘So what?’ supplies a welcome dose of devil-may-care insouciance from both performers.

With Deutsch evidently enjoying his many moments in the spotlight and Beczała at the top of his considerable game, this has to be the finest Russian song recording to come my way since Asmik Grigorian and Lukas Geniušas’s award-winning Rachmaninoff recital last year. Now, might Beczała ever be persuaded to take on Hermann in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades…?