The audience were in tears: Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall reviewed

‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show you someone who’s never tried to sell tickets for the Op. 9 string trios. Even Mahler, the blockbuster concert phenomenon of the past four decades, has his limits. Audiences love him, sure. But in 2011, when several orchestras performed complete Mahler cycles, the limits of that love became embarrassingly clear. The Second and Eighth symphonies — roof-raising choral spectaculars — promptly sold out. The gentle Fourth and the knotty, reconstructed Tenth: not so much. As for his songs, forget it.

Well, that’s lieder for you. For most Anglophone music lovers, the entry barriers to the world of German song — a near-native understanding of Schiller, Goethe and Heine, just for starters — can feel impossibly high. (For some reason, any suggestion that lieder recitals should have surtitles still provokes massed handbag-clutching.) It’s not a wholly closed world. It’s possible to recognise a great song or a great performance while still being intensely aware that you’re missing something vital. But essentially you’re outside looking in, and without a lot more work on your classroom German, that’s where you’re going to stay.

The Wigmore Hall is different; but then, Wigmore audiences are, shall we say, unusual. So what to report about Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber’s Mahler recital? It was sold out, of course. The programme was curious: the five Rückert-Lieder plus a handful of songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, prefaced by part of Das Lied von der Erde, and rounded off with the long final song from the same work, ‘Der Abschied’. Compared with the orchestral version, it felt curiously abstract, for all the subtlety of Huber’s piano playing and Gerhaher’s heartbreakingly tender phrasing.