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.

This is surely a Winterreise too far. The finest interpreters – including, among tenors, Peter Schreier, Ian Bostridge and Christoph Prégardien – make the wanderer’s inner and outer journey through the snowbound landscape a cathartic experience. Hans Jörg Mammel, whose career has been largely in early music, musters a generalised sensitivity but never grips or haunts the imagination.

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.

Winterreise, or Winter’s Journey, was composed in 1827, just a year before Schubert’s premature death. The song cycle contains some of his greatest music – by turn highly emotional, desolate and spare, and with a sense of alienation and loss that makes the listener shudder even after repeated hearings. Schubert was especially proud of these songs, writing to his friend and fellow composer Josef von Spaun: ‘I will sing you a cycle of eerie songs.

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.