Von Otter gives classic love songs a fitting airing

Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter balanced classical and pop tunes.

CAMBRIDGE - On Valentine's Day eve, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, accompanied by the jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, ended her Celebrity Series recital with "Some Other Time," Leonard Bernstein's classic of romance deferred. It was a fitting postscript to a program combining classical and pop, songs of love with songs of evanescence, musical distillates of moments passing, imagined, and remembered.

The classical first half, with von Otter joined by her longtime pianist, the superb Bengt Forsberg, contrasted that transience with music's capacity for formal architecture. Songs by Jean Sibelius compared love's tenuity with passing seasons and nature's mutability, fixing fugitive moments within strophic clarity. Two solo piano pieces - brief tributes on the centenary of Haydn's death by Maurice Ravel and Paul Dukas - harnessed slippery, hazy harmonies to solid, classical structure, lending melancholic atmosphere to a juxtaposed trio of prepossessing Reynaldo Hahn songs.

In place of a voluminous sound, von Otter drew the listener in with clear, quiet vibrancy; far from simply keying overall moods, each song prompted a new, specific physical characterization, from which the vocal quality ensued. Less-familiar Robert Schumann lieder showed the range - a misbehaving girl in "Die Kartenlegerin," casting her own ephemeral comic-melodramatic life's fortune; the bleak rage of "Der Soldat," doomed love again captured within the confines of musical genre, here a military march.

Mehldau took the keyboard after intermission for his own five "Love Songs," on poems by Philip Larkin, Sara Teasdale, and e.e. cummings, balancing anticipated love against its fragile attainment. In some numbers, melodies echoing popular song stretched over repeated rhythmic and harmonic cells that, despite Mehldau's motivic malleability, seemed detached from the dramatic intent. But two of the Teasdale songs were strongly compelling: "Twilight" deploys lissome polytonal counterpoint, lending its lovelorn plea an eerie cast; "Because" enriches its 1970s pop ballad feel with a deep, calibrated harmonic palette.

The pair closed with popular standards, for which von Otter's adjustment was subtle; her pared-down pliancy on Richard Rodgers's "Something Good" might have been jazz-inspired, but Hahn's "A Chloris" had shown the same color. Mehldau's accompaniments were elegant and restrained, matching Forsberg's ability to project both delicacy and presence; on two songs made famous by von Otter's countrywoman Monica Zetterlund, including the bewitching "Att angora en brygga," he rose to a sophisticated lounginess. But the sense of fleeting time remained. Lennon and McCartney's "Blackbird," hushed and pulsing, intimately captured both sides: waiting for love's moment to arise, but also watching it inevitably pass away.