PCMS presents Thomas Meglioranza, baritone, and Reiko Uchida, piano

Meglioranza’s light baritone easily filled the American Philosophical Society’s Benjamin Franklin Hall, complemented by Reiko Uchida’s supportive piano accompaniment. (The pair regularly perform together around the world.) But the timbre of his once-attractive voice has turned noticeably pallid; perhaps to compensate, he now overuses vibrato to give an illusion of tonal color and variety.

This choice seems at odds with Schubert’s youthful, vigorous music — particularly in the cycle’s first 10 songs. “Das Wandern” (“Wandering”), which opens the 60-minute work, extols the virtues of a young miller’s peripatetic life, comparing his flight from town to town to an ever-flowing brook; the tragedy of this comparison eventually becomes clear.

In the meantime, the speaker falls in love with the title character. “If only I could turn / Every millstone / So that the beautiful girl of the mill / Would notice my true feelings,” he sings in “Am Feierabend” (“After Work”). She doesn’t return his affections, and her rejection sets the young miller on a path that leads to suicide by drowning in the once-life-giving brook.

Where's the love?

Meglioranza showed little distinction as the cycle moved from the joyful promise of young love to an irredeemable pain of heartbreak. Nowhere was this more evident than in a pair of linked songs — “Die liebe Farbe” (“The Beloved Color”) and “Die böse Farbe” (“The Wicked Color”) — that chart the speaker’s growing disdain for the color green, his sweetheart’s favorite.

“My love is so fond of green,” he sings one moment. A second later: “I’d like to pluck the all the green leaves from every branch!” But in Meglioranza’s flat delivery, it was hard to tell when he was praising verdancy and when he was cursing it. The two songs should sound like a continuation of the same thought, but here, that continuation lacked virtually any sense of contemplation.

The general absence of introspection that pervaded the performance made its final song, “Des Baches Wiegenlied” (“The Brook’s Lullaby”), oddly anticlimactic. Müller allows the water to speak, soothing the miller as he dies, assuring him, “You shall lie with me, until the sea drinks up all the brooks.”

It’s cold comfort for the miller, who trades love for death, but it should be shattering for the audience. Yet Meglioranza failed to infuse the poetry with even the slightest sense of loss. It was left to Uchida to capture the spirit of the song, as the plaintive piano accompaniment continued for several measures after the miller’s suicide.

Throughout the recital, Meglioranza’s German sounded bell-clear but astonishingly unidiomatic — what one might expect from a well-practiced undergraduate, not an artist of international stature (particularly one with two prior Schubert recordings to his name). This only reinforced a sense of preparation without ideation, turning one of the greatest song cycles ever written into a rather dull afternoon.