There’s nothing in music quite like Winterreise. It takes the listener on a journey into the very depths of the soul, and perhaps beyond, with nothing other than a singer and a pianist for company, thus producing both the rawest and the most intimate musical communication you could imagine. It’s as dramatic as any opera, and more so than most, because the drama takes place in the mind, and a great performance grips the heart.
This one gripped mine. All three of Schubert’s song cycles are featuring in this year’s East Neuk Festival, but Mark Padmore’s singing of Winterreise, along with the poetic pianism of Joseph Middleton, set the bar so high that comparisons seem extraneous.
Padmore is no longer a young man: he has actual grey hair, so that the imagery of Der greise Kopf is no longer a fantasy. But that means that he brings to his singing a lifetime of experience of this music, and it tells in every carefully-turned phrase, every consonant enunciated with such care and laden with such meaning. He brings a world-weary quality to Schubert’s wanderer – this isn’t a young man who has been freshly jilted – but with that come insights and depths that you just don’t get with singers who are nearer to the start of their careers.
Padmore stands rooted to the spot as he sings. Aside from a few gestures, all of the acting is done with the voice, and the result is completely compelling. Even the first song, Gute Nacht, seemed to run a gamut of emotions from disengaged bitterness to pained reluctance, setting the tone for a performance that wrung every ounce of meaning out of both text and music. The stunned numbness of Erstarrung, the unattainable solace of the linden tree, the frenetic energy of Rückblick, the sweet dream of Frühlingstraum that dissolved into bitter violence: all served to underline a state of mind on the edge of emotional collapse that nonetheless seemed determined to carry on in spite of it all.
Perhaps there’s an occasional pained quality to the voice, and high phrases mostly weren’t lingered over, unless on words of sorrow like Trän (tear) or Grabe (grave), and if you chose to hear it then you might notice the voice tiring in the second half of Schubert’s 70-minute journey. However, Padmore turned that to his advantage by giving the cycle’s final third a delicate, almost valedictory quality, coming close to transcendence in the contemplation of the end that comes with Das Wirtshaus and Die Nebensonnen.
He had the perfect collaborator in Middleton. He turned the piano into an equal partner, and while Middleton may not have Padmore’s years of living with the cycle, he has remarkable depth of insight nonetheless. So many little touches were made to breathe and come to life, like the way he lingered so gently over the turn to the major in the final stanza of Gute Nacht, or the circling dance of the crow, or the delicate rustle of the linden tree that sounded so much more poignant, more cruel for being in the major key. When it came to those final songs, he played the steady chords of Das Wirtshaus with tender, hymn-like beauty, suggesting that the poet just might find transcendence at last, and his hurdy-gurdy accompaniment for the final song was emaciated and dark but still humane.
The audience sat in focused stillness throughout, barely daring to break the silence as the final notes ebbed away – surely the greatest compliment you can pay to any performance.
