Emphasising the composer's vocal music, the South Bank's Scenes from Schumann series opened two weeks ago with a concert performance of his only opera, Genoveva. And last Saturday, in the Royal Festival Hall, it brought his first oratorio, Das Paradies und die Peri, conducted by Mark Elder with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its choir.
Though performances are still rare, both Schumann's large-scale choral works, Das Paradies from 1843, and his 1853 Scenes from Goethe's Faust, have fared better in the concert hall in the past 10 years than they did for most of the previous century.
The use of period instruments may have something to do with that. As Elder's excellently paced and played performance showed, all the old gripes about the stodginess of Schumann's scoring are confounded when the music is realised by the forces that he was writing for. Orchestra and soloists balance nicely and the music takes on a lightness and sense of purpose that could be overwhelmed by too much weight of tone.
For all its transporting moments, though, Das Paradies und die Peri may still be an acquired taste. The story, from a poem by Thomas Moore, is cloyingly sentimental: the peri, a transcendentally beautiful creature from Persian mythology, searches for the "gift that is most dear to heaven" so that she may gain entrance into paradise and, of course, eventually finds it. The musical pacing is rarely dramatic, even though Schumann first thought of turning the text into an opera.
Yet taken on its own terms it is still endlessly fascinating. There are moments that echo Schumann's songs, and passages clearly modelled on Beethoven (Fidelio and the Ninth Symphony). But the flavour is intensely personal and beguiling.
The Peri herself was sung by the thrilling American soprano Christine Goerke (making her British debut), turning what can be an insipid character into a wholly credible one. The principal tenor, who bears the brunt of the narration, was the lucid and unforced Paul Nilon. The rest of the line-up, the mezzo Bernarda Fink, soprano Mary Plazas, tenor Peter Auty and bass Tomas Tomasson, was equally distinguished.
The thread running through the Schumann song-recital series in the Queen Elizabeth Hall is the pianist Roger Vignoles. On Monday he appeared with a quartet of young singers - Emma Bell, Sarah Connolly, Toby Spence and Stephan Loges - in some rare works. With its four solo voices and accompaniment for piano duet, Schumann's Spanische Liebeslieder was almost certainly the model for the Brahms Liebesliederwaltzer, its pairing in this programme, but it lacks the direct appeal of the later work.
The poems it sets are not very distinguished and there is always the feeling with Schumann's songs that he responded most ardently to the finer literature; Ruckert and Morike bring out more from him than Geibel's lyrics. In the context of this survey, though, it was good to hear and in such sharply characterised performances too.
• The series continues on February 17 and 22. Box office: 020-7960 4242.
