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Winterreise, D911
25 March 2002
London, Wigmore Hall
Simon Keenlyside, baritone
Graham Johnson, piano
Franz Schubert:
Winterreise (Song cycle)
What the critics say
Andrew Clements for The Guardian
Tuesday March 26, 2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/review/0,,743848,00.html
Rating 4 stars
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Simon Keenlyside is such a compelling stage performer, capable, as the recent Covent Garden Don Giovanni demonstrated, of rescuing a production through the sheer physicality of his theatrical presence, that in the concert hall he can sometimes seem confined and his talents under exploited.
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But Schubert's Die Winterreise does present a dramatic challenge of a special and demanding kind and last night in that work at the Wigmore Hall he showed how acute and concentrated his sense of inner drama can be.
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There were few visible signs of emotion, no extravagant gestures of any kind. Keenlyside remained stock still throughout, mapping the emotional journey of the song cycle's protagonist through the nuances and shadings of the vocal line. It was lieder singing of maximum refinement and intelligence,with everything executed with the minimum of fuss.
There was none of the knowing, interventionist interpretation for which Fischer-Dieskau used to be so admired, or the arid calculation of Matthias Goerne.
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Keenlyside's response to the text seemed spontaneous, yet there was always the sense that each song was projected as a unity, and not broken up by a preoccupation with every passing sensation. The protagonist he presented rejected all suggestions of self-pity, even as his alienation became more acute. This traveller on his winter's journey remained defiant rather than despairing.
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In the second half of the cycle, as the imagery becomes more vivid, and everyday objects - the crow, the signpost, the phantom suns - increase the sense of unhinged reality, so Keenlyside allowed his vocal range to expand, until he sang the final Der Leiermann in a tone purged of colour.
It was effective, though Graham Johnson's piano playing, for all its authority, never mapped the journey so starkly; there was always something too genteel about the accompaniments, and that is not a word to describe what Keenlyside achieved.
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Some of the most perfect singing you could hope to hear
By Anna Picard for The Independent, 31 March 2002
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article195523.ece
Few singers, however technically adept, are equally convincing in opera and lieder. Though interconnected, the two disciplines are as different as chalk and charcoal. One requires gestures that can signal emotion across vast auditoria. The other requires the kind of holistic involvement that can convince the closest observer – the kind of emotional truth that is revealed in a performer's eyes or the flick of a facial muscle. If a Strauss aria proves tricky, you might play with the woodwind or swoon a little with the strings. If a Schubert song goes awry, there's nowhere to hide. A pianist can't save a singer who's in trouble, nor is anyone likely to send in a troupe of spear-carriers to distract. Lieder, devoid of accessories beyond a keyboard, renders a singer naked.
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So who are the singers that can meet the demands of both disciplines? Mezzo-sopranos Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, Bernarda Fink and Angelika Kirschlager can. So can tenor John Mark Ainsley. Of the sopranos, I'd pick Véronique Gens and Dawn Upshaw. Of the baritones, Thomas Hampson and Simon Keenlyside. And, with the possible exception of Hunt-Lieberson, Keenlyside is the most extreme in fusing these two styles: an auteur of miraculously crafted emotional honesty. Just as well. If any song-cycle needs that level of commitment, Winterreise does. The devil is not merely in the detail here – detail that calls upon minute variants of tonal quality – it's in the arc of thought that stretches across each of the 24 songs.
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As a study of isolation, alienation and morbid grief, Winterreise is up there with Thérèse Raquin, La Nausée and James Baldwin's Another Country. As a play of light and shade, it out-chiaroscuros Caravaggio. As an exposition of the relationship between dreams and reality, it pre-shadows Freud. Yet it's also minimalist. Neither the destination nor the departing point of Schubert's anonymous traveller is named. All we know is that his former lover was – or was perceived to be – unfaithful, and that he therefore longs for death but cannot resolve to take his own life. It's painful beyond belief – melancholy and misanthropic to the very end – but listeners are nonetheless drawn to it for the simple reason of its beauty: a beauty that works not only to soothe that pain but to point the consequent irony with bitter delicacy.
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In Simon Keenlyside's interpretation, Winterreise is less like performance than private thought or memory. The recital hall convention of (apparent) artist-audience eye-contact is all but absent, while his gestures are restricted to an occasional, seemingly unconscious, Dürer-esque prayer pose. Thus the Wigmore Hall's audience were not invited in to his recital this week, but were peeping Toms to a very personal journey through Schubert's music and Wilhelm Müller's poetry. And disquieting as it was to watch bitterness, rage and despair move across such a private public face, this is some of the most perfect singing I've heard. Fluid lines (Einsamkeit), flickering paired semi-quavers (Rast), arpeggios as dramatic as escarpments (Irrlicht), slow burning intensity (Die Krähe), blistering diction (Der Wegweiser), sumptuously stretched rhythmic details (Der Lindenbaum) and haunted emptiness (Der Leiermann).
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How much of this did pianist Graham Johnson intensify or assist? Sadly not much. Though he probably knows more about Schubert's lieder than any other musician in this country, his musculature is showing signs of age. The accompaniment was cluttered and unsubtle, the details – particularly those in the left hand – indistinct. Worse still were the moments where singer and pianist pulled in different stylistic directions: Keenlyside all steel and glass, Johnson as bustily upholstered as a Chesterfield sofa. One worked with the simplicity of strophic form, the other attempted to distract from it – a job best left to Schubert's own subtle nuances – and my overall impression was of an irresolvable argument between a voice that was experiencing the music and the voice of experience. As beloved a figure as Johnson is at the Wigmore Hall – and will no doubt continue to be – it might be time for him to pass on his knowledge in an offstage capacity, and time for Keenlyside to find another collaborator.
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