Baritone

When Franz Schubert in 1827 invited a friend to the first performance of his Winterreise, he called it "a cycle of horrifying songs". The texts that he had chosen to set were by the poet Wilhelm Müller, whose 24 poems form a psychodrama which starts with regret over a lost love but develops into an inner voyage in which a nameless Wanderer probes for answers to existential questions. There is no plot, no events in the external world: instead, we spy on fleeting emotions and thoughts. In setting these poems to music Schubert was confronting his own probable fate: Winterreise was completed the year before his death in 1828, at the age of 31, and he will have known that the syphilis he had contracted in late 1822 often led to insanity and paralysis before release in death. With this in mind, one understands why Schubert himself said that the cycle had cost him "more effort than any of my other songs".

The Ragazze Quartet contributes not only the sonority of four string instruments, but also the energy of four musicians who at the same time connect with the music and the singer. The challenge, was to remain faithful to Schubert while exploiting to the full the extra possibilities offered by this instrumentation.The four members of the quartet have immersed themselves in the texts, and, in collaboration with the arranger Wim ten Have, have taken care to create a score perfectly suited to the baritone Martijn Cornet and themselves.

Far from being prejudicial to the work’s integrity, a transcription of Winterreise for voice and string quartet follows a tradition that enabled the music of Schubert, from 1830, to spread throughout the whole of Europe. The lieder in particular were the object of the most diverse adaptations, with the voice replaced by a cello, a violin, a horn or even a cornet, and the piano part at times orchestrated. Such an approach is therefore perfectly authentic, even if the juxtaposition of a string quartet and the lied is not the easiest to deal with; the first indeed embodies a noble genre, scholarly, elaborate in style, stylistically complex, whereas the second remains attached to its popular origins and to a simplicity in both the vocal part and the accompaniment.

Matthias Goerne, one of the most high-profile Schubertians of his generation, has recorded a selection of Schubert’s songs not in their original versions with piano but in orchestral arrangements by Alexander Schmalcz, Goerne’s accompanist of many years’ standing. Goerne says about Alexander Schmalcz’s arrangements: “His creativity in adapting these songs for the orchestra is enormous, while his stylistic sensibilities and his subtle approach in deploying the right instruments at the right moment are truly astonishing.” “Schubert’s ability to empathize makes him one of the most important composers in the whole of human history. (…) He created “a perfect balance between intellectuality and the greatest naturalness. With Schubert, even the most complicated melodies and forms sound entirely natural.” (Goerne) And yet what we hear on this album is “pure Schubert”, Alexander Schmalcz insists. “I have added nothing. Sometimes I fill out the voices by doubling the octave, for example. Or I write sustained chords in the orchestra in order to simulate the sound-surfaces that are the result of the use of the sustaining pedal on the piano. But my goal is to be as original as possible.”

The sound of a baritone guitar isn’t something you can get by simply tuning a standard guitar down a perfect fourth. The lower tension on the strings ends up sounding thin and lacking in sustain, not to mention introducing problematic tuning drift where notes start sharp and go flat as they decay. Baritone guitars solve this with a longer scale length, which not only addresses the tuning issue but also provides a heartier sustain and fuller tone.

The sound of a baritone guitar isn’t something you can get by simply tuning a standard guitar down a perfect fourth. The lower tension on the strings ends up sounding thin and lacking in sustain, not to mention introducing problematic tuning drift where notes start sharp and go flat as they decay. Baritone guitars solve this with a longer scale length, which not only addresses the tuning issue but also provides a heartier sustain and fuller tone.