Schubert - Winterreise
Padmore; Lewis
Harmonia Mundi HMU907484

Release date October 2009

This is an outstanding Winterreise, and also a fascinating one. Here we have two masters of their craft, tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Paul Lewis, coming together in true musical partnership. The subtleties evident in Lewis’s playing – the hesitations in the first song mirroring Padmore’s diction, the sense of hypnotic calm he evokes in Flood, the inexorable rhythmic pulse of many of the songs – are striking, but serve only to enhance the vocal part. Padmore employs no vocal gimmicks, but the range of tonal colour at his disposal is such that he can express an almost infinite variety of emotion without either numbing or grating on the listener’s ear. Beauty is a hallmark of this Winterreise: the quality of Padmore’s voice; the highlighting of nature’s beauties in the poetry; the memories of love. There is of course the pain of loss, and in the first half especially a see-sawing between sanity and almost unhinged despair. In the second part of the cycle, the feeling is more one of desolate acceptance of fate – yet other emotions flicker throughout, Padmore’s bleached tone in The Crow hinting at madness, Lewis’s darting, dappled accompaniment in Last Hope evoking feelings of distress. Neither artist is afraid to let rip where the text or music demands, resulting in moments where each communicates with a thrilling physicality. Padmore’s diction throughout is superb, unforced but clear. As the short but valuable booklet essay notes, at the heart of this cycle is man at the mercy of unknown forces, some understood, some not. Life’s journey continues, and its inexorable nature is particularly well conveyed in the rhythmic vitality of this performance. This is a reading which is more about life than death, and no lieder fan should be without it. Gramophone has made the disc its Record of the Month in the November issue.

Reviewed by Anne McAlister