Newsday, April 2005

With a voice at once silvery and dark, compact yet ripe with overtones, soprano Soile Isokoski is in increasing demand as a Wagner and Strauss interpreter. New York so far has heard her primarily in Mozart and French opera, most recently as an achingly poignant Rachel in Halévy's La Juive and as Marguerite in the Metropolitan Opera's glitzy new staging of Gounod's Faust.

Isokoski's Zankel Hall recital on Sunday suggested that New Yorkers might be missing out on something even more wonderful: a great Elsa, Ariadne or, down the line, Isolde. The Finnish soprano closed her program with a mesmerizing account of Wagner's death-besotted "Wesendonck Songs." Her complex timbre underscored the ambiguity of Mathilde Wesendonck's verses: exultant yet almost painfully radiant in the closing measures of "Schmerzen," which proclaim an agony the singer is glad to bear; velvety but throbbing like a wound when she sang of voluptuous suffering in "Im Treibhaus."

The "Wesendonck Songs" are often the province of lumbering voices, but Isokoski's lean yet intense tone and elegant handling of Wagner's long lines proved revelatory in "Der Engel" and "Stehe still." To "Träume," the cycle's final song, she brought a shimmering calm that could turn giddy with sensuality or plunge unnervingly into a clear-eyed contemplation of death, as in the last word—"Gruft" ("grave")—whose mournful, hollow vowel she prolonged to arresting effect.

Pianist Marita Viitasalo's playing ebbed and rippled like a half-remembered lullaby.

Sheer ferocity informed Isokoski's performance of Aulis Sallinen's "Four Dream Songs" (1973), sweet puddles of dissonance that tell of nightmares, visitations and time's devouring force. The dark core of her voice, aglow with harmonics, captured the weirdness of "Three Dreams, Each Within Each" and the vertiginous swirl of "Cradle Song for a Dead Horseman." The gasps that greeted the abrupt ending of "There Is No Stream" testified to Isokoski and Viitasalo's spellbinding way with this cycle.

Selections from Hugo Wolf's "Italian Songbook" found Isokoski in less inspired form. "Ich hab in Penna einen Liebsten wohnen" built to a noisy and largely unintelligible climax; the impetuous "Man sagt mir, deine Mutter" plodded. Viitasalo offered sensitive support, with delicate attacks in "Auch kleine Dinge" and splashing evocations of raindrops in "O wär dein Haus."

While Isokoski is a celebrated Mozartian, her opening group of Mozart songs was marred by unsteadiness and some ungainly register shifts, though she hit her stride in the soaring, proto-Romantic "Abendempfindung." (She had sung in a worldwide broadcast of Faust the day before, and looked relieved when Mozart's mercilessly exposed works were over.)

The riotous applause Isokoski won for Ture Rangström's "The Dark Blossom" left one longing to hear more from her and this gloriously moody Swede, a pupil of Hans Pfitzner. The soprano's soft, high attacks in "The Farewell," her molten, gorgeously shaped phrases in "Prayer to Night," and her bold, hammering intervals in "The Dying Tree" offered enticing glimpses of a composer and performer whose merits demand frequent revisiting.



SOILE ISOKOSKI. With Marita Viitasalo, piano. Attended Sunday at Carnegie's Zankel Hall. For information, visit www.carnegiehall.org or call 212-247-7800.