Review of English song Winterreise – Roderick Williams brilliantly reflects Schubert’s famous song cycle | classical music

RAudrey Williams had the idea of ​​creating an English equivalent of Winterreise when studying Schubert’s famous song cycle a decade earlier. Since then, he has refined his playlist, adding and subtracting until he finally arrives at the interesting program presented here. It’s a captivating conceit that holds water for over an hour and a half, especially in the hands of such a bold and instinctive narrator.

Some connections were clear. Vaughan Williams’s The Vagabond is played with the same stubborn tread as Winterreise’s Good Night, while the wave of strings that drives Quilter’s Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind mimics Schubert’s madly swirling Weathervane. The arboreal imagery and homely melody of Linden Lea, here delivered in a gently teasing Dorset accent, is a musical parallel to the similarly popular Linden Tree.

Others were more subtle, though effective. Schubert’s Will-o-the-Wisp is mirrored in Ena Boyle’s A Song of Enchantment (one of many delightful discoveries here). Winterreise’s 19th-century mail coach finds an echo in Britten’s Midnight at the Great Western. Later, the ill-fated crow found himself translated into a mysterious angel and Schubert’s Inn – itself a metaphor for a cemetery – became Finzi’s literal graveyard in the churchyard.

There was one striking difference. While Schubert’s tortured protagonist leaves behind a relationship recently gone awry, Williams’s reworking is often concerned with long-lost love and the irreversible passage of time. Was that a problem? Not at all, although it gave the newly orchestrated English song cycle a deeper melancholy than the original, which sounds more assertive and youthful.

Williams proved to be the perfect guide to this repertoire, as his phraseology, dramatic body and illuminating way with the text brought new insights to old favourites. Take, for example, the loneliness and loss explored in Finzi’s At Middle-Field Gate in February, or the layers revealed in the singer’s exquisite setting of Blake’s The Angel. He is aided and abetted throughout by Christopher Glen’s poetic and balanced piano playing, and the synergy of the musicians is never more penetrating than in Britten’s account of Hardy’s listless boy on his lonely train journey. Chilling stuff.