The first thing we notice about baritone Konstantin Krimmel is his commanding presence. He engulfs his audience with an emotional and vocal assurance that mines the very essence of this beautifully curated program of songs by Franz Schubert, Carl Loewe and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Then we discover that Krimmel has perfect diction. It’s a gift to the high born German texts of the Schubert and Loewe songs. They come through with a clarity that at key moments virtually eliminate the need for translation. Even the English texts of Robert Louis Stevenson employed by Vaughan Williams in his Songs of Travel, often diminished in transition to operatic voice, sounded exactly as they should, bucolic, folkloric and seeped in nature.

Though composing in the same era, Loewe and Schubert employed vastly different means of turning text into musical story. Their settings of Goethe’s “Erlkönig” are case in point. Composed almost contemporaneously, they follow different paths in presenting this tragic tale of a young boy and his father pursued by Erl, a supernatural being. In the program’s first half Loewe’s setting is brooding and heavily atmospheric, emphasizing the natural environment of the chase as metaphor. As the evening’s final selection Schubert opts for tension and action as the piano assumes the role of galloping horses while Loewe’s horses become incidental to his disturbing expression of Erl.

Both settings are challenging to singer and accompanist. The number of characters portrayed in Goethe’s tale require a flexible theatrical sensibility solidly embodied in Krimmel’s rendition. It also requires the baritone, in quick order, to reduce his commanding sound to a whisper and to shift characters and attitude with dance like ease. Had the songs not been so adroitly placed their contrasting postures might have felt jarring, or worse, redundant. Instead they enrich the program with their exploration of musical ideas.

Pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz negotiates the requirements of both composers, effectively handling Schubert’s rapidly repeating cords and octaves and Loewe’s subtle yet often disorienting evocations with extraordinary skill. The rapport between singer and accompanist is always fascinating to observe. Krimmel and Bushakevitz are in sync, much like the forces of nature that play such a prominent role throughout the evening.

The program continues to contrast these composers with an abundant sampling of Schurbet’s cerebral and melancholy works including in “Der Wanderer” and the exquisite “An den Mond”, prime examples where translation is optional. Loewe’s more narrative songs like “Herr Oluf” and his setting of Goethe’s “Der Totentanz” have a generally more robust feel despite their sad ends.

Krimmel and Bushakevitz journey together into the English countryside with Vaughan Williams in his aforementioned Songs of Travel. Bushakevitz’s captures the spirit of these songs with disarming ease and Krimmel’s insightful dive into their folk song origins is communicated with grace and an unalloyed adoration of nature. It may be a blessing or a curse that one is hard pressed to proclaim a favorite Vaughan Williams song. Whether it be “The Vagabond”, “Youth and Love” or the brief but reflective “I have trod the upward and downward slope”, they are als simply beautiful.

Krimmel chose as an encore Vaughan Willams’ setting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Silent Noon”. He commented that the song spoke to the renewing power of nature to bring us through dark and uncertain times.

“…Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, This close-companioned inarticulate hour When twofold silence was the song of love.”