Wigmore Hall, London
A caprice of planning has decreed that two illustrious duos would perform Schubert's Winterreise song cycle at the Wigmore Hall within less than a fortnight. But who's complaining? The coincidence has been a fascinating back-to-back opportunity to sample some of the infinite interpretative possibilities of this supreme work. Where Ian Bostridge and Mitsuko Uchida brought home the hallucinatory qualities of the 24 songs, Robert Holl's rich bass-baritone and Andr�s Schiff's mesmerising accompaniments emphasised the cycle's gathering weight and the irresistibility of the poet's fate.
Right from the start, it was clear that Holl's winter traveller would be one man setting out against a hostile and heedless universe. His tenebrous baritone, which in any other work one might be tempted to describe as autumnal in timbre, gave his handling of the cycle a huge cumulative, oppressive force. The stress on "selbst" in the opening Good Night went straight to the heart of the work ? a solitary man constantly struggling to find his own path through the darkness.
Moments of contrast were kept to a minimum; there was a brief and telling one in the lightening of tone as the traveller imagines the melting of the snow in Flood, but the sound of the post horn in The Mail Coach had little of the momentary brightening that some singers allow. If this meant that the darkness of Holl's journey was unusually unremitting, it nevertheless allowed him an authentically Promethean moment of defiance in the penultimate song, Courage, before the bleakness of the final vision, in which Schiff, ever an equal protagonist, played like a man half-stunned by the implacability of it all.
Laura Prepon Ashley Scott Michelle Behennah Julie Benz Saira Mohan
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