A chilling Winterreise for our times
mainFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
At the 15th song of the Winter’s Journey, a piano melody that seems to come from the nursery turns into a bleak anticipation of death. ‘The crow has come with me…. Flying ceaselessly above my head.’ Anyone listening will know that Franz Schubert will be dead within a year. But Schubert does not know he is going to die. He is thirty years old and feeling a bit low from various ailments, but he has no idea that he is writing his own requiem. Our knowing against his unknowing heightens the paradox …
Read on here.
And here.
“Kristian Bezuidenhout at the fortepiano is a discreet companion”
In the excerpts I listened to, Bezuidenhout’s playing is deeply characterized, as always. He is an exceptional artist who richly deserves his success (even though we don’t hear about him in this blog.
Overall it seems like an excellent new recording of this masterpiece.