Winterreise

David Greco and Erin Helyard present the first Australian recording of Schubert’s masterpiece on period instruments.

David Greco and Erin Helyard present the first Australian recording of Schubert’s masterpiece on period instruments.

Peter Mattei has won great acclaim as a singer with unusual dramatic gifts, appearing on the world’s leading stages in complex operatic roles such as Don Giovanni, Billy Budd and Eugene Onegin. On the present release he takes on a no less complex character in the Lieder canon: the traveller in Schubert’s Winterreise. In this cycle, Schubert returned to the poet Wilhelm Müller, whose poems he had set some years earlier, in his other great song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin. Müller’s texts revolve around a young man who after being rejected leaves his village and heads into the desolate, snowy countryside. In the course of the cycle he experiences loss and an aching loneliness interrupted by fleeting glimpses of hope, but ultimately the landscape through which he is moving is colored by alienation and despair. Müller died at thirty-two years old in 1827, the very year in which Winterreise was composed – and Schubert himself died the following year, still making revisions to the last of the songs while on his deathbed. When Schubert invited his closest friends to a gathering in order to listen to the cycle he called the songs ‘gruesome’, and according to one witness the audience was shocked by their sombre mood. In this recording, Mattei brings all his interpretive skills to bear. He is supported by the piano of Lars David Nilsson, which reinforces the different moods and characters of the twenty-four songs and often assumes the role of a narrator, alongside the singer.

World famous mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and conductor-pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin join forces to take on one of the most brilliant song cycles ever written: Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey). DiDonato, however, casts a different light on this beloved cycle of 24 songs in telling their story from the perspective of the woman, the lost love. Nancy Plum, Town Topics writes: “The question of what happened to the woman who sent the narrator on a tortuous journey was not answered in the Wilhelm Müller poetry from which Schubert drew the text, but DiDonato created a scenario onstage of being that woman, reading from the narrator’s journal and responding to the inherent despair.” “What stood out was the heavy emotion that came through in her singing, as she lingered on a syllable here, pressed her tone there. She created vivid feelings with her contrasts” wrote New York Classical Review about Joyce Didonato’s interpretation.