Schubert brilliantly pushed to the edge of insanity
Last December, Ivan Hewett gave a five-star review on these pages to a performance of Hans Zender’s reinvention of Schubert’s song-cycle Winterreise by Allan Clayton and the Aurora Orchestra. That rave review lured me to a new production of the work with Ian Bostridge, designed and staged by Netia Jones. From the moment it opens with an almost inaudible taptap-tapping – the cracking of ice, the pecking of birds, the rustling of rodents? – Zender’s orchestration of the original piano part seems to me astonishingly brilliant and arresting.
Without a hint of kitsch, it doesn’t so much magnify as intensify Schubert’s vision, leaving its basic shape and text unaltered, but adding colours, sonorities, repetitions, pauses and emphases that build an atmosphere of dislocation and alienation. In the terminology of rock music, the score is sampled and mashed up in a peculiarly modern form of the principle of variation, with wheezing accordions, muted trumpets, morose saxophones and eerie percussion. The result is that what can seem like a polite collection of twodozen songs of romantic melancholy is rawly exposed as the narrative of a desperate man teetering on the edge of insanity – a figure out of a godless play by Samuel Beckett. Cadaverous and epicene, sometimes fiercely aggressive, other times self-absorbed, Ian Bostridge is presented first as a conventional lieder singer in tails and then as the dishevelled traveller, disappointed in love; perhaps the cabaret satirists of the Weimar Republic are suggested too. Unnervingly, he breaks down, seeming to be on the verge of freaking out of control, and what should be sung is only spoken.
Bostridge, in excellent voice and acting with rare subtlety, can have done nothing better than this; and the playing of the Britten Sinfonia under the Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann is superb. My only reservation is a degree of cliché in the visual imagery, and moments that are emptily illustrative rather than dramatically expressive. But this is an enthralling tribute to Schubert’s genius.