If you needed to define the essence of romanticism in music, you could do worse than point to the opening song in Robert Schumann's "Dichterliebe" ("Poet's Love") cycle.
Delicate and achingly beautiful, "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" set a headily poetic atmosphere at the outset of Wednesday evening's Source Song Festival recital by American tenor David Portillo.
Portillo is a recent Twin Cities transplant, and this was his debut recital in Minneapolis. It was also his first "Dichterliebe," and he unraveled an interpretation already full of insight and individual temperament.
The 16 songs of "Dichterliebe" dissect the joys and fragilities of love, in music that veers from wild excitability to wounded introspection.
It is all too easy for the soloist to slip into a self-pitying wimpishness that alienates the listener's sympathy. But that was never a danger in Portillo's virile, dignified traversal of the poet Heinrich Heine's wryly ironic lyrics.
The heartache of "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh" was palpable but quietly stoic. "Ich will meine Seele tauchen" fluttered with sensitivity, but Portillo skillfully stopped short of being soppily narcissistic.
The piano part in "Dichterliebe" is a story in itself, adding significant psychological information about the lovestruck singer. Olivier Godin played it with acute perception. His tweaking of rhythms in "Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen" brilliantly suggested the instability underlying the singer's traumatic vision of his true love marrying another.
And in the achingly beautiful coda to the final song, "Die alten, bösen Lieder," Godin conjured a poignant sense of the pain that lingers when a love goes wrong, and consolation seems impossible.
