Review: Mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter offers an intimate, emotional concert at the Ordway

Departing the Ordway Concert Hall Tuesday afternoon after a lovely recital by Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, I passed a sign outside the neighboring Xcel Center touting a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert in March.

It's striking how rock and pop careers seem to have no expiration date, while the great classical vocalists often still embrace retirement sometime in middle age.

But if you still have the skills and enjoy doing it, sing on. And von Otter most definitely does. At a very youthful 67, she remains not only a star of the international opera stage, but is among the prime purveyors of European art song from the late classical and Romantic eras. Her mezzo voice is pure and her theatrical approach to interpretations unfailingly engaging, as she demonstrated while launching the Schubert Club's 2022-23 International Artist Series season.

It was a program built around the songs of Franz Schubert — with some complementary offerings from Swedish romantic Adolf Fredrik Lindblad — that will be repeated on Thursday evening. While von Otter may often belt arias to the back row of the world's great opera houses, she showed that she also can gently shape intimate and emotionally expressive songs of heartbreak, longing and moonlight reveries.

Aiding von Otter in her quest for quiet was Kristian Bezuidenhout, one of the world's most renowned masters of the fortepiano. His instrument of choice predates the modern piano and would have been the kind that Schubert played (likewise Mozart, who was represented by a haunting Rondo in A minor). Without the modern piano's metal framing and thick strings, fortepianos create a thinner, woodier sound with a much narrower dynamic range.

That worked well for the melancholy mood von Otter summoned up on such sad meditations as Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" and an elegiac "Nocturne" that proved a beautiful blend of power and delicacy. Equally absorbing were three songs adapted from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels and a pair of paeans to bright moons shining down upon heartbroken narrators.

But von Otter didn't only dwell in darkness. The songs of her countryman Lindblad benefitted from a bright tone and ebullient spirit before the subject inevitably turned to death. And the mezzo made many a song seem like a slice of opera with her theatrical manner, introducing the audience to one engaging character after another, including a dancing spirit, a dying waif and the proud owner of a carrier pigeon.

Interspersed between these sets of songs were opportunities for Bezuidenhout to demonstrate what the keyboard works of Mozart and Schubert may have sounded like when they debuted. While the fortepiano's sound can take some getting used to — the instrument isn't as resonant or versatile as a contemporary concert grand — Bezuidenhout made two Schubert sonatas and the Mozart Rondo more than just museum pieces on a replica of a 19th century fortepiano from the Schubert Club's collection. Each work flowed beautifully beneath his hands, proving ideal interludes between von Otter's arresting interpretations.

Anne Sofie von Otter

With: Fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout

What: Songs and sonatas by Franz Schubert, Mozart and Adolf Fredrik Lindblad

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday

Where: Ordway Concert Hall, 345 Washington St., St. Paul

Tickets: $28-$75, available at 651-292-3268 or Schubert.org

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. Reach him at wordhub@yahoo.com.