It’s been tried before, of course. The idea of adding another dimension to Schubert’s Winterreise so that words and music are given extra weight and colour. Earlier this year John Bridcut’s version with Benjamin Appl and pianist James Baillieu, a reimagining high up in the Swiss Alps, surrounded by vast quantities of snow, was given a BBC airing. But that was film. This now was a rare staged event where everything was three-dimensional. Right on cue the weather had cloaked the outer world in a sheet of biting cold, and with rumblings off suggestive of a new winter of discontent and a state of inner turmoil, Schubert’s music can hardly have seemed more appropriate.
I missed the intimacy that comes with a smaller space than London’s Barbican. Yet there were gains: the sense of the protagonist abandoned in an empty and hostile universe, revealing innermost fears and hopes before succumbing to a message of despair, powerfully delivered to a large and rapt audience. Allan Clayton and his accompanist Kate Golla, both clad in dark attire, alone on a simple set with two walls as projection surfaces, the piano positioned centrally within the right-angle, the wanderer moving both within the set as well as across the expanse of darkness without: it could only amount to an intensely theatrical experience.
Both visually and vocally, Clayton delivered a compelling quasi-operatic monologue. Each gesture had significance: the stroking of his beard, the patting of the piano lid, a pointing finger, an outstretched hand, kneeling down with his nose almost touching the ground for Auf dem Flusse, bent double through increasing weariness and casting off his overcoat for use as a pillow in Rast, his eyes wide open in desperation for Letzte Hoffnung, walking a simulated tightrope in Im Dorfe, standing detached and apart stage-left for both the opening and closing songs of the cycle.
Despite suffering a chest infection Clayton conveyed an impressive range of emotion. Granted, there were the odd moments where the voice frayed at the edges and the transitions between registers were not always even. Paradoxically, these shortcomings only served to underline the frailty of the wanderer’s condition. Though the whining quality and emphasis given to the self-pity of Erstarrung slightly detracted from its underlying stoicism, there was an athletic attack and almost Alberich-like malice to his characterisation of Die Wetterfahne, a spectral vein as the protagonist sees his reflection in the brook for Auf dem Flusse. Clayton’s voice opened out gloriously at “Mein Herz?” to express the forlorn optimism of Die Post and he pared it back to a chilling whisper for the word “zurück” which closes Der Wegweiser, finding at times a child-like poignancy in Der Leiermann.
Throughout the cycle Golla was a sensitive and equable accompanist, providing the necessary ripples of agitation for Der stürmische Morgen, yet underplaying those ominous rumbles which should unsettle the spirit as dogs dark and chains rattle at the opening of Im Dorfe.
The visual element was given over to projections of largely abstract landscapes by the Australian painter Fred Williams. These were essentially static representations of underlying moods or gave pictorial expression through arboreal surroundings for Der Lindenbaum and a snowscape for Wasserflut. There were garish daubs of colour to accompany the cheerfully dancing light of Täuschung, and a wash of ochre and sand for Die Nebensonnen. It was in the moments of half-light, however, where emotions were most keenly engaged: I will long treasure the ghost-like silhouette of Clayton projected against the bare side wall of the Barbican as all energy seeps away in the concluding Der Leiermann.
