My first inkling of strangeness came before the first notes, with an usher passing up and down the aisle advising us of the program’s length and the absence of any intermission. The inkling became a bemusement at the end of the Berg set, when the last notes of “Warm die Lüfte” had not yet sunken in before Trifonov was wending his way into the captivating opening bars of “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” and the awareness dawned that we and the performers were to proceed through this lengthy, varied, and challenging program not only without an intermission, but without so much as a break between groups. (At the end of the Dichterliebe, where one might have expected an intermission, Trifonov’s extremely delicate rendering of the final postlude, which can and should be devastating, instead competed with the dear old Liederabend-for-foreigners sounds of many program pages being hurriedly turned.) Not, mind you, that we are not now accustomed—our buttocks callused, our postures straightened with solid bone-to-bone contact, our brains set to classroom-attention mode—to daunting stretches of artstuff with no swig at the flask or raising of hands for a restroom break, but who would want this? Is there a point being made, the Endless Melody, the Eternal Chain of Being in Song? Is it supposed to unify, to cohere? It does no such thing. What it does is guarantee that none of these discreet works, each with its distinct harmonic and melodic idiom, its internal progression, its rise and fall, its final emotional destination and concluding mood, and in the case of the Schumann its outright narrative, has a chance to register, to make its statement, before being shoved to the rear by the next. Even in a great performance, this instructs us that we are to swallow the artstuff whole and pass it through the system undisgested. And what sort of performance was this?

It started with Goerne, clad entirely in black, leaning in Trifonov’s direction with one arm dangling, like a pitcher looking in for his sign. With the first notes, he began weaving or swanning from side to side, his face turned upward, as if dispensing lyrical blessings around the upper tiers. This turned out to be the more pervasive of his two body-language modes for the evening, the other being a kind of jolly stein-song jouncing up and down in more up-tempo songs or passages, like “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen” in the Schumann or at “Der gute Tage und genug hat,” etc., in Brahms’ “O Tod, wie bitter bist du.” One or the other of these modes was nearly always with us, and while each could be said to be at least vaguely related to the music, what they signaled was that all music is divided into two unequal parts, the moonily swanning and the merrily jouncing. Never did either seem connected to a specific interpretive gesture. Never did they arrive at a still point to help define a moment or highlight a phrase.

There were three aspects of Goerne’s singing, functionally interrelated and, at least arguably, also related to his physical manner, that to my ear hampered his high artistic aspiration:

1.  At full voice, Goerne’s timbre is prevailingly dark. This not in itself a fault. An important range of expression can be found among the darker hues, and at times Goerne explored it to good effect. But no shaft of light shone through. Even when he sang “open” upper notes, the tone secure and the words clear, the position not “spread” (the E-naturals at  “Strömt meine Tränen Fluth” in “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” are a good example), no metallic or gem-like gleam came to enliven the charcoal shade, and no quickening of vibrato to carry a message of emotion. It’s as if upper partials were missing, on all vowels and throughout the range. This absence of any version of brightness, brilliance, “ping,” “singer’s formant”—whatever we choose to call it—lent a monotony of color to the proceedings. 
2.  His softer singing inclines to the wispy, whispery sort that has become the latterday substitute for mezza-voce. So long as it remains in the middle range it can create an impression of a confiding intimacy, and can alternate ingratiatingly with the warm mezzo-forte in that same tessitura that represents his voice at its best. It carried Goerne through the Berg comfortably enough. As he wafted it up to the F for “Die Liebe aufgegangen” and then “mein Sehnen und Verlangen” in the first Schumann song, however,^(I) there it was, the odd Papageno-dialogue tone. I asked myself whether or not this note at the upper edge of the passaggio could be swelled evenly through to a balanced full-voiced sound (the standard test to determine if a soft sound should be deemed a “legitimate” mezza-voce). I thought that perhaps it could (it was not a detached falsetto), but not in an aesthetically acceptable fashion; it would reveal the constriction that underlies the peculiar timbre.
3.  While Goerne sings a kind of legato, it is not of the classic sort that combines the messa di voce (the swell-and-diminish) with the portamento (the “carriage” of the voice). That kind of legato (not just a smoothness, but a binding of the line) gives the subliminal sense of the intervals between pitches being always filled in and traversed on a curve, even when the overt effect of a slur or a portando is not being sought.

What these three shortcomings add up to is an inability to set up a continuous interplay of color and dynamics as a song moves along. As with his two modes of physical energy, Goerne can alternate soft with loud (the former being the choice on a deflating majority of occasions), but his soft seems to hold the promise of loud only on a few middle-ish notes, and his guidance of the line is too often blunt and declarative. And while his “diction” can be pronounced excellent in basic terms, he hasn’t much in the way of rhetorical choice at his disposal. Nor could I detect a latent florid or ornamental capacity—again, something we sense even when uncalled-for that adds to our comfort with a singer’s technical range and control. These are technical lacks at the structural, foundational level. If a voice isn’t positioned, “set,” quite right, that affects all the varieties of balance the voice seeks—registral, resonantal, respiratory—in addition to its ease of movement. (It works the other way round, too: if any of these balances are off-center more than a little, the voice will not find its ideal set. It’s one of those Catch-22s that keep voice workers on their toes.) Like all highly talented performers, Goerne transcends these lacks to a remarkable degree. But they are there.