Schubert: Winterreise D911

Schubert: Winterreise D911

2014 | Hyperion

Gerald Finley (bass-baritone)

About

The Gramophone-award winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake turns to perhaps the most celebrated song-cycle of them all. Schubert’s Winterreise is a masterpiece of despair, astonishing in its bleakness and enthrallingly mesmerizing as the journey continues. Finley brings all his considerable dramatic powers to his performance—and all but submerges them under the ice.

Richard Wigmore writes that ‘before Winterreise Schubert had composed individual songs of pathos and despair, even of apocalyptic terror. What was new about the cycle was the spareness and angularity of much of the writing, the work’s sustained godless pessimism and its obsessive exploration of a mind veering between delusion, ironic self-awareness and nihilistic despair. The water music, limpid, turbulent or benedictory, of Schubert’s earlier Müller cycle, Die schöne Müllerin, yields in Winterreise to musical emblems of trudging and stumbling, bareness and exhaustion, derangement and frozen, trancelike stillness’.

Track Listing
  1. Winterreise D911 | Gute Nacht [5’50]
  2. Winterreise D911 | Die Wetterfahne [1’54]
  3. Winterreise D911 | Gefrorne Tränen [2’40]
  4. Winterreise D911 | Erstarrung [3’04]
  5. Winterreise D911 | Der Lindenbaum [5’22]
  6. Winterreise D911 | Wasserflut [3’42]
  7. Winterreise D911 | Auf dem Flusse [3’50]
  8. Winterreise D911 | Rückblick [2’14]
  9. Winterreise D911 | Irrlicht [2’26]
  10. Winterreise D911 | Rast [3’31]
  11. Winterreise D911 | Frühlingstraum [4’32]
  12. Winterreise D911 | Einsamkeit [2’52]
  13. Winterreise D911 | Die Post [2’17]
  14. Winterreise D911 | Der greise Kopf [3’06]
  15. Winterreise D911 | Die Krähe [2’05]
  16. Winterreise D911 | Letzte Hoffnung [2’22]
  17. Winterreise D911 | Im Dorfe [3’34]
  18. Winterreise D911 | Der stürmische Morgen [0’53]
  19. Winterreise D911 | Täuschung [1’16]
  20. Winterreise D911 | Der Wegweiser [4’24]
  21. Winterreise D911 | Das Wirtshaus [4’24]
  22. Winterreise D911 | Mut! [1’28]
  23. Winterreise D911 | Die Nebensonnen [3’03]
  24. Winterreise D911 | Der Leiermann [3’44]
Reviews

“Julius Drake, accompanying, is equally lyrical, fluent, expressive. Neither lets the music shout…The disc lends itself to repeated exploration.” – The Observer

X