Schubert Winterreise

Schubert knew madness. He knew it to the depths of his soul and feared it. And out of his fear he wrote the greatest monument to love lost, to death lost, to madness found. He wrote Die Winterreise, the most hopeless art work ever conceived by the despairing mind of man. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is the voice of Winterreise. In small part, this is because he recorded it seven times between 1952 and 1990. In larger part, this is because he is able to transform himself into the despairing lover. Yet Fischer-Dieskau is still the most lucid and most technically controlled of madmen. As Ingmar Bergman remarked on actor Max von Sydow, "If I'd had a psychopath to present these deeply psychopathic roles, it would have been unbearable". At 55, Fischer-Dieskau returned to Winterreise in 1980, no longer the sad swain or the suicidal lover, but as a man bowed with age and burdened with an interpretive past. His voice far past freshness, Fischer-Dieskau still has something to say concerning Winterreise, indeed, about man's fate. Accompanied by the self-effacing Daniel Barenboim, Fischer-Dieskau sings of the meaninglessness of love of the pointlessness of life.

Renowned Schubert interpreter Ian Bostridge revisits Winterreise, the greatest of all song cycles, on his first PENTATONE album. Bostridge presents this masterpiece together with pianist, conductor and composer Thomas Adès, who bases his profound accompaniment on a fresh engagement with the original manuscripts. Winterreise is the epitome of Romantic melancholia, written by a composer aware of his fatal illness but at the height of his creative powers. It is the first installment of a trilogy of PENTATONE recordings comprising the major Schubert song cycles. After Winterreise, Die schöne Müllerin and Schwanengesang will follow. Ian Bostridge is one of the most celebrated tenors and lied interpreters of his generation. Thomas Adès is best known as a composer but demonstrates his extraordinary skills as a song accompanist on his first PENTATONE recording.

Franz Schubert’s masterpiece, his song cycle Winterreise(‘Winter Journey’), was written shortly before his death in 1828, at the age of only 31. On his winter journey, the singer wanders as a lost soul in harsh terrain, wracked by conflicting emotions, but consoled by his memories of kinder times. Benjamin Appl commented, Every time I perform it, Winterreise feels like a new and different journey, depending on my own mood, the atmosphere in the hall, and of course the shared creativity with the all-important pianist. For singers, Schubert’s wanderer is a lifetime companion, yet a daunting one as we confront all the great recordings and performances that are already out there.

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to the Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team.

Schubert's "Winterreise" is one of the most famous song cycles that exist in classical music and musicians take it up again and again because of its beauty, sorrow and depth. It is about life itself and which performer does not want to give his or her opinion on life? Both tenor Christoph Prégardien and pianist Michael Gees have their own vision on the cycle. Playing together, a third view develops, combining their two visions into an exciting interpretation of Winterreise.

Roderick Williams and Iain Burnside complete their survey of Schubert's song cycles with this recording of Winterreise. Composed in the late 1820s, towards the end of Schubert's tragically short life, Winterreise (Winter Journey) is a setting of twenty-four poems by Wilhelm Müller and describes a traveller leaving the town which was the home of the object of his unrequited love, to embark on a long journey, through a chill, wintry landscape, which ends in near-suicidal despair. This recording represents the culmination of a project that started back in 2015, when Williams accepted the challenge to prepare and perform all three song cycles in one season at the Wigmore Hall in London.

The result really is something special, a performance of growing intensity and concentration, which gradually exerted an iron grip on me as listener – right up until a deeply moving ‘Der Leiermann’.

Winterreise, the Winter Journey, brings both the performer and the listener to the fundamental questions of humanity and existence. The human and social levels of the work remain pertinent and current. A prize winner of several competitions including the International Mozart Competition in Salzburg, Finnish baritone Arttu Kataja graduated from Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and became a member of the Berlin State Opera in 2006 performing such parts as Conte, Figaro, Guglielmo, Papageno, Marcello, Belcore, Musiklehrer and Besenbinder, to name but a few. Guest engagements have led him to Theater an der Wien, Théâtre du Capitole Toulouse, Teatro Municipal in Santiago de Chile, Staatsoper Hamburg, Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Finnish National Opera and Savonlinna Opera Festival aswell as to Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul. He is a versatile recitalist and concert singer with repertoire ranging from baroque to contemporary music.

A superstar of opera, Jonas Kaufmann is somewhat less renowned for his interpretations of art songs, though this 2014 Sony release of Franz Schubert's Winterreise is his second disc in the genre, following his 2009 recording of Die schöne Müllerin for Decca. Even though it's more recognizable in the context of his Wagner and Verdi roles, Kaufmann's fluid and strongly supported tenor voice is well-suited to Schubert's arching lines and lyrical expressions, and its warm tone and rich timbres convey a variety of moods and emotions with minimal effort and no strain.

The result really is something special, a performance of growing intensity and concentration, which gradually exerted an iron grip on me as listener – right up until a deeply moving ‘Der Leiermann’.