COMPOSERS: Schubert
LABELS: Virgin
WORKS: Winterreise
PERFORMER: Thomas Allen (baritone)Roger Vignoles (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: VC 5 45070 2 DDD (1991)
This Winterreise wears neither its heart nor its skills on its sleeve, and makes its way into the affections only slowly. Songs of reflection and retrospection along the traveller’s dark way are lightly held; those which move his journey ever onward are weighed down by a weariness that occasionally seems to go beyond even the wanderer’s own. The voice’s movement becomes all but petrified in the icy ‘Frozen Tears’; the traveller becomes all but rooted in the graveyard. Thomas Allen paints the winter journey in shades of grey, gently feeding each reticent phrase, and generously supported by Roger Vignoles’s characteristically inspired accompanying. The acoustic is appropriately sepulchral. Hilary Finch
Schubert: Winterreise
This Winterreise wears neither its heart nor its skills on its sleeve, and makes its way into the affections only slowly. Songs of reflection and retrospection along the traveller’s dark way are lightly held; those which move his journey ever onward are weighed down by a weariness that occasionally seems to go beyond even the wanderer’s own. The voice’s movement becomes all but petrified in the icy ‘Frozen Tears’; the traveller becomes all but rooted in the graveyard.
Our rating
4
Published: January 20, 2012 at 3:16 pm