“Come over to Schober's today, and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying songs. I am anxious to know what you say about them. They have cost me more effort than any of my other songs”. These were the words with which Schubert coaxed his friends to come listen to Winterreise – 24 settings for tenor voice and piano of poems by Wilhelm Müller, mostly cast in minor tonality, which chart a rejected lover’s bleak trudge through a snow-covered landscape. It was 1827, and the following year he would die from syphilis, aged 31. So, while a preoccupation with death and loneliness had been a constant theme in Schubert’s music, with Winterreise those themes reach their ultimate expression.
This reading sees Wagner specialist James Rutherford join colleagues such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Matthias Goerne in transposing them down to the baritone range, and Gute Nacht makes for a highly satisfyingly start: a nice, rounded weight to Eugene Asti’s trudging piano chords, and from Rutherford himself the balance of warm fullness with lighter-voiced delicacy. Onwards, and it’s all highly expressive, but never overblown. In fact, while their outbursts pack punch – Rutherford’s heartrending final shout of Da ist meine Liebsten Haus (“That’s where my beloved’s house is”) at the close of Wasserflut, or Asti’s colouristic range at the centre of Frühlingstraum, from menacing lower register growls to devilishly sharp, upper register stabs – it’s often the delicacy that most strikes; the impression they create of bleak, surrounding silence, thanks as much to Asti’s lightness on the pedal as to Rutherford. Most effective of all is the desolate quiet hanging over their Der Leiermann as each crisply, rhythmically imitates the hurdy gurdy grind, before the elegant, anguished curve of Rutherford’s final question, “Strange old man, Should I go with you? Will you to my songs Play your hurdy gurdy?” © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz