Schubert's Winterreise performed by Matthias Goerne and Markus Hinterhäuser

Schubert's Winterreise performed by Matthias Goerne and Markus Hinterhäuser

This take on Schubert’s vast, late song cycle Winterreise presents a recital against a backdrop of animations by South African artist William Kentridge, recorded in Aix-en-Provence in 2014. The stage is littered with scraps of paper, overspill from the backdrop onto which the animations are projected.

Our rating

4

Dr Natasha Loges

Published: April 23, 2019 at 10:03 am

COMPOSERS: Schubert
LABELS: C Major
ALBUM TITLE: Schubert
WORKS: Winterreise
PERFORMER: Matthias Goerne (baritone), Markus Hinterhäuser (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: DVD: 738008; Blu-ray: 738104

This take on Schubert’s vast, late song cycle Winterreise presents a recital against a backdrop of animations by South African artist William Kentridge, recorded in Aix-en-Provence in 2014. The stage is littered with scraps of paper, overspill from the backdrop onto which the animations are projected.

The images range from the poignant (such as the tracing of a woman’s face in the snow) to the enigmatic. Kentridge’s own memories of the work inspire some allusive, elliptical images like a goldfish in a bowl, shower heads, slogans, and a recurring image of a portly, middle-aged man walking.

The camera could have better conveyed the experience, instead of flitting indecisively between a ‘traditional’ view of the musicians, the animations, and various perspectives in between. And we see virtually nothing of the pianist until, sweat-soaked, he receives his applause at the end. Still, the performance is suffused with Goerne’s and Hinterhäuser’s peculiar rhetorical intensity and freedom. And do watch the bonus 45-minute bonus documentary, in which Hinterhäuser reminds us of the work’s universality and relevance: ‘each person carries his winter journey within himself’.

Natasha Loges

Dr Natasha Loges

Journalist and Critic, BBC Music Magazine

Natasha Loges is the head of postgraduate programmes and professor of musicology at the Royal College of Music. She is a regular critic for BBC Music Magazine and broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and BBC TV. Her research interests include German song, concert history, 19th-century performance practice and gender studies, with a particular focus on the lives and music of Brahms and the Schumanns. Her PhD, undertaken at the Royal Academy of Music, was titled 'Text and Context in Brahms's Lieder'. Her books include Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Brahms and His Poets (Boydell, 2017), Brahms in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydell, 2019) and German Song Onstage (Indiana University Press, 2020).
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