Choral & Song
Ian Bostridge’s years of experience with Winterreise reap fresh rewards for him, says Sarah Urwin Jones
Schubert
Winterreise Ian Bostridge (tenor), Thomas Adès (piano) Pentatone PTC 5186 764 72:26 mins Ian Bostridge has returned repeatedly over the years to Schubert’s devastating Winterreise, so much so that in 2015 he wrote a book about it. This is his second recording of the song cycle, which sets Wilhelm Müller’s 24 poems on the mental disintegration of a man rejected by his lover, this time accompanied by Thomas Adès on superlative form. The performance was recorded live at Wigmore Hall in September 2018, although for all the audience presence you might think Bostridge and Adès were alone in some chilling concert hall at the end of the world.
The death knell is sounded from the off in a ‘Gute Nacht’ whose clipped, relentless piano footsteps suggest a man turned in on himself, impelled to wander until the grave – or at least until he finds imagined succour in the real exile of the hurdygurdy man some 70 minutes later. Even Bostridge’s sometimes jarring crescendos sound as bleak cries from the hollowed soul. There is a terrifying icy detachment in Adès’s evocative touch – although not without occasional warmth in other songs, or more, as in the buoyant, cantering impulsion of ‘Die Post’ – emphasising the loneliness, and he skilfully sketches landscapes both real and metaphorical. Above it, Bostridge’s weary wanderer cries out against an unlistening world – for why should it listen, the poet seems to ask.
In this devastating, brilliant interpretation, Bostridge’s tone is dark, expressive and fluid; from his crow-croaked ‘krahe’ as the ominous bird follows him in the eponymous song, to his growling rolled rs of ‘knurren’ in ‘Der Leirmann’. With Adès, he moves from the exquisite beauty of ‘Das Wirtshaus’ to the final thin, cruel breeze across the ice as the hurdy-gurdy man drones indifferently on.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
There is an icy detachment in Adès’s evocative touch